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Dilemmas of race, register, and inequality in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2017

James Collins
James Collins*
Affiliation:
University at Albany/SUNY
*
Address for correspondence: James Collins Department of AnthropologyUniversity at Albany/SUNY1400 Washington Avenue, Albany 12222USA[email protected]
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Abstract

There is strong evidence that legacies of Apartheid remain in place in South Africa's education system, entangling economic inequality, racial categorization, and de facto language hierarchy. This study draws from an ethnographic study of language diversity in a Cape Town public school, focusing on how classroom practices regulate and school staff frame language diversity and social inequality among their pupils. It uses the concepts of language register, sociolinguistic scale, and racialization to analyze how education policy, classroom practices, and school discourses about language in South Africa implicate class and racial hierarchies. It shows how register analysis reveals multi-scaled connections between linguistic and social inequality. (Language registers, education, social inequality, South Africa)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 46 , Special Issue 1: Metapragmatics of Mobility , February 2017 , pp. 39 - 56
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

* The research reported here was supported by a Fulbright Teaching/Research Fellowship to Cape Town, South Africa, for January–July 2104. Initial writing up of research results was supported by a University at Albany sabbatical for Fall 2014. I am indebted to the staff and students of South City Primary for their generosity in accommodating my research, and to colleagues at the University of the Western Cape and the University of Cape Town for helping to orient me to Cape Town and its schools and for invitations to seminars and other venues for presenting and discussing initial arguments and analyses.

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