Ana Deumert

University of Cape Town | UCT · AXL

This article explores the dialectics of hope and anger as responses to what Lear (2006) called ‘devastation’, the colonial-capitalist destruction of the ontological groundings of life. Lear argues that ‘radical hope’ allows for ‘survival’ in such contexts, and his work has been influential. Yet, I want to be careful with relying on hope as a politi...

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the...

In this article, I reflect on the complexities of signification and suggest that the study of music allows us to push forward the radical project of dis-inventing language in applied linguistics (Makoni and Pennycook 2007). In thinking about language, music, and meaning, I focus on a song that has travelled around the globe and that has sounded the...

In this article, I reflect on the future of macro-sociolinguistic research from a global-south perspective. I discuss the role that activism has played in scholarly work, and how such activism was hampered by persistent ideologies of ‘thingification’; that is, ideologies that created languages and nations as ‘objects’ (to be managed and controlled...

This article engages with the theme of the proposed special issue in a perhaps unexpected way: for me, the ‘translinguistic movement’ is a pertinent reminder to move beyond the boundaries of language and other visible/audible modalities that are involved in semiosis. It also encourages us to move beyond the naïve empiricism that has shaped sociolin...

This article explores language ideologies and sociolinguistic scales from the perspective of decolonization. Coloniality is a multi-scalar world system that affects micro-level interactions in multiple locales, both in the metropole and in the former colonies. Not only does coloniality exist on a world scale, resistance to it is scaled up too and e...

In this chapter the authors move away from pejorative and derogatory definitions of populism that have shaped media reporting and scholarly debate from the 1950s onwards. Their argument is grounded in the anticolonial and decolonial struggle for liberation and freedom, a struggle that would not have been successful without the political participati...

Debates about the legacy of colonialism in the academy are not new. In linguistics, however, critiquing and interrogating the history of the discipline and its status as being part of the practices and epistemes of colonialism, which continue into the here-and-now, have only been carried out reluctantly. This chapter introduces the reader to key th...

The discipline of linguistics in general, and the field of African linguistics in particular, appear to be facing a paradigm shift. There is a strong movement away from established methodologies and theoretical approaches, especially structural linguistics and generativism, and a broad move towards critical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and lingui...

Bridging Linguistics and Economics - edited by Cécile B. Vigouroux March 2020

The article explores the emotional regimes of settler colonialism in post‐apartheid South Africa. The focus is on apocalyptic fears of the imagined eradication of whiteness. These fears are articulated in response to postcolonial/decolonial interpellations of abject whiteness, and are made visible in a range of sensational signs that circulate onli...

In this article I explore a particular set of contact varieties that emerged in Namibia, a former German colony. Historical evidence comes from the genre of autobiographic narratives that were written by German settler women. These texts provide – ideologically filtered – descriptions of domestic life in the colony and contain observations about ev...

In this article we provide a discussion of present-day Khoisan activism in Cape Town, South Africa. The main actors in this movement are people whose heritage is complex: their history can be traced back to the early days of the colonial settlement, reflecting the interactions and cohabitation of the indigenous Khoisan, slaves and the European sett...

This paper introduces the special issue of Language Sciences on Sociolinguistics and Language Creativity. Current interest in language creativity is located within a wider interest in creativity in everyday life, evident across the humanities and social sciences. The paper argues that such vernacular creativity is particularly relevant to the conce...

This paper approaches creativity from the perspective of an everyday, decolonial–postcolonial aesthetics. While creativity emphasizes human agency, improvisation and, more broadly, the process of ‘bringing novelty into the world’ (Bhabha, 1994), aesthetics is about the perception and experience of creative acts and products (Dewey, 1934; Saito, 201...

In 1996, the inclusion of sexual orientation in the anti-discrimination clause of South Africa's post-apartheid constitution aligned LGBT+ rights with the larger struggle against oppression and inequality. In this paper we focus on a small, rural town in the Eastern Cape, a town we call Forestville. How are LGBT+ identities made visible in this tow...

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1984-8420.2015v16n2p239

Have wireless mobile communication technologies changed the way people talk to one another? What does it mean to be able to speak or write to anyone, anywhere, 24/7/365, and get an immediate response? And what does the current profusion of these technologies mean for the study of language in social life? Do we need to develop new approaches, method...

Superdiversity has emerged as an important keyword in the field of sociolinguistics. In this article, I argue that the use of ‘superdiverse’ as a descriptive adjective is a theoretical cul-de-sac, because the complexities brought about by diversity in the social world ultimately defy numerical measurement (as it would require infinitely more fine-g...

This chapter explores contemporary social network(ing)1 applications as a space for the performance of a ludic self and the carnivalesque. Although digital media are also used for serious, information-focused communication, many interactions appear to follow the broad conversational maxim of ‘keep it light/fun’, and as such these media have become...

This paper discusses African multilingual digital writing, focusing on one digital genre: texting. Our analysis draws on quantitative and qualitative data from five highly multilingual African countries: Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa. Writers are shown to draw on local as well as global linguistic resources in crafting the...

In this paper we will provide a preliminary overview of the Chinese diaspora in South Africa, with particular focus on non-metropolitan, rural contexts. The migrations of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced a complex array of Chinese communities around the world. While we know a fair amount about the Chinese diasporas...

This article looks at a particular type of migration, that is, the often cyclical and pendulum-like movements from the villages of the Eastern Cape to Cape Town (South Africa). The ethnographic analysis focuses on the semiotic practices migrants engage in as they make the city their home, and develop urban styles of speaking and being (i.e. fashion...

This handbook takes stock of recent advances in the history of English, the most studied language in the field of diachronic linguistics. Not only does ample and invaluable data exist due to English’s status as a global language, but the availability of large electronic corpora has also allowed historical linguists to analyze more of this data than...

Hans den Besten (1948-2010) made numerous contributions to Afrikaans linguistics over a period of nearly three decades. His writings helped shift the perspective on the roots of Afrikaans beyond Dutch to the structure and vocabulary of Khoekhoe, to Portuguese Creole, and to Malay varieties. This volume contains a selection of Den Besten’s most impo...

While the concept of standardization is well-established in linguistics, de-standardization is a more recent addition to linguistic terminology. Draw-ing on historiographic and ethnographic data from isiXhosa, one of South Africa's indigenous languages, this paper reflects on both of these concepts. Standardization is discussed as a modernist grand...

This paper considers the role of multilingualism in health care by drawing on the results of an empirical study conducted in three public hospitals in the Western Cape, South Africa. Data were collected through questionnaires, staff and patient interviews as well as ethnographic observation. The focus is on the large number of isiXhosa-speaking pat...

This paper provides an analysis of language shift from African languages to English (and Afrikaans) in South Africa, using home language data from the South African population census (1996 and 2001). Although census data have been criticised for its ‘essentialist’ construction of language, they nevertheless provide sociolinguists with a unique oppo...

This paper provides the first overview of the history, sociolinguistics, and structures of Namibian Kiche Duits (lit. “kitchen German”), which is today a dying contact variety. The analysis draws on archival records, colonial publications, and memoirs, as well as over 120 sociolinguistic interviews conducted in 2000. Early varieties of Namibian Kic...

The relationship between ethnolinguistic fractionalisation and development has long been of interest to economists and linguists. While econometric analyses have shown relatively stable interactions between high levels of fractionalisation and low indices of development, the mechanisms underlying this relationship are still unclear. This paper expl...

This paper looks at language choice and use in South African SMS communication (texting) among bilingual (isiXhosa / English-speaking) users. Although English is the preferred language for most of the 22 participants (aged between 18 and 27), SMSes also create a forum for isiXhosa literacy (either in isiXhosa messages or in mixed English-isiXhosa m...

In a study of international student security, consisting of 200 intensive interviews with students, resident onshore in Australia, it was found that two thirds of the group had experienced problems of loneliness and/or isolation, especially in the early months. According to Weiss, students experience both personal loneliness because of the loss of...

This article gives an overview of the linguistic consequences of transnational and national migration: language diversification and spread, language contact, dialect leveling and the formation of new dialects in urban contexts and overseas territories, language shift and maintenance, bilingualism, code-switching, language formation, and second lang...

This volume presents a careful selection of fifteen articles presented at the SPCL meetings in Atlanta, Boston and Hawai'i in 2003 and 2004. The contributions reflect – from various perspectives and using different types of data – on the interplay between structure and variation in contact languages, both synchronically and diachronically. The cont...

A growing number of students cross national borders for their studies. An expanding global market in higher education has been created. Yet significant gaps exist in the governance of international students' rights. As well as being educational service beneficiaries, cross-border students are migrants, workers, consumers and human beings. A broader...

Rural–urban migration is a major phenomenon in the developing world. This article is concerned with understanding the ways in which rural–urban migrants have their social protection needs met following their move to the city. We report results from a survey of rural–urban migrants in four low-income areas in Cape Town, South Africa. We look at the...

From the 1820s humorous representations of the local vernacular began to appear in the periodical press of the Cape Colony. These popular texts developed into a highly productive genre and influenced the formation of an early Afrikaans written norm by shaping expectations of social, linguistic and local authenticity. Whereas the early vernacular re...

This paper discusses McCormick’s sociolinguistic study Language in Cape Town’s District Six [McCormick, K., 2003. Language in Cape Town’s District Six. Oxford University Press, Oxford] and locates it within the fields of South African sociolinguistics and language contact studies. McCormick’s work raises pertinent questions about sociolinguistic hi...

This paper reports the redevelopment and subsequent evaluation of a unit in dialectology within a foreign language curriculum (German). In doing so it is a case study which serves to offer insight into the student experience of studying linguistics within a foreign language curriculum, the potential of online/electronic pedagogies for the teaching...

Word count: main paper + references = 8927 words (+notes 181 words) preliminaries: title pages, contacts, bio-notes, abstract, keywords = 547 words Authors, affiliations, contact details (Dr.

Sociolinguistics is characterised by increasing heterogeneity, and students are faced with a proliferation of theories, concepts and terminology. This is sometimes a minefield, with similar terms used rather differently within different academic traditions. The dictionary provides a broad coverage of sociolinguistics, including macro- and micro-soc...

Mühlhäusler [J. Pidgin Creole Lang. 14(1999)121] has argued in his discussion of non-canonical creoles that the study of those contact varieties ‘which researchers in the past have found difficult to label’ (ibid., p. 357) is important for our understanding of contact languages. This article argues that their study can also be relevant to our under...

From the late 1980s historical linguists have repeatedly criticised autonomous, system-internal historical linguistics and emphasised the need to incorporate human agency and intentionality into our explanations of language change, a concern most clearly articulated in sociolinguistic approaches to language history. The article evaluates the ways i...

In the introduction we have commented on a number of themes or leitmotifs of standardization which can be observed across the individual case studies collected in this volume. The existence of persistent historical commonalities between standard languages has been a central motivation for the construction of cross-linguistic models and the general...

Bien loin que l'objet précède le point de vue, on dirait que c'est le point de vue qui crée l'objet (Ferdinand de Saussure 1916:23). Traditionally, historiographers of Afrikaans have argued that a relatively uniform (spoken) vernacular existed at the Cape from the late eighteenth century, where it constituted the L(ow) variety in a diglossic situat...

Sociolinguistics is one of the central branches of modern linguistics and deals with the place of language in human societies. This second edition of Introducing Sociolinguistics expertly synthesises the main approaches to the subject. The book covers areas such as multilingualism, code-choice, language variation, dialectology, interactional studie...

In this paper we examine the demand for education among rural Black households in South Africa using nationally representative data from the 1990s. In particular our study focuses on factors affecting schooling decisions at the household level. Our estimation results reveal strong evidence of a sibling synergy effect, in that the presence of other...

The m4Lit (mobile phones for literacy) pilot project will create a mobile novel (m-novel), published on a mobisite in English and in isiXhosa, to explore ways of supporting teen leisure reading and writing around fictional texts in South Africa, using mobile media. The story will be published serially and invite readers to interact with it as it un...