Relanguaging Language from a South African Township School

Lara-Stephanie Krause-Alzaidi

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800412149
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Enseñanza de las artes lingüísticas

Using data from a long-term ethnographic study of English language classrooms in a South African township, this book highlights linguistic expertise in a setting where it is not usually expected or sought. Rather than being 'peripheral and unskilled', South African township teachers and learners emerge as skilled (re)languagers central to the workings of South African education, and to our understanding of how language classrooms work. This book foregrounds the heterogeneity, flexibility and creativity of day-to-day language practices that African urban spaces are known for, and conceptualises language teaching not as a progression from one fixed language to another, but as a circular sorting process between linguistic heterogeneity (languaging) and homogeneity (a standard language).

1 Introduction

1.1 Tricked into Detours

Author:	So do you think there is almost like a specific Xhosa – or language – that evolves in the township? In the…elokishini?
Teacher in Khayelitsha:	Yah but it’s mixed with ilanguage yamaColoured, amaXhosa and the White.

Language teaching is built on the assumption that named languages – nomolanguages – exist as separate, homogeneous entities and is aimed at the mastery of standardised codes. In this view, English teaching in South African townships like Khayelitsha is failing. Learners (and teachers) underperform in standardised English tests and are repeatedly described as cut off from the standard linguistic norms needed for success beyond the township. In my view, this deficit perspective has exhausted its explanatory potential. I wish to develop an alternative perspective on township English classrooms, its theoretical point of departure being the heterogeneity, flexibility and creativity of day-to-day language practices in (South) African urban spaces that the teacher describes in the opening quote. The next step is to theorise – in close dialogue with the Khayelitshan case – the relationship in which such heterogeneous languaging stands to the production of a homogenised standard language as the target of the traditional language classroom. I therefore explore the field of tension between linguistic fluidity and fixity, between heterogeneity and homogeneity. A closer look at the opening quote illustrates this tension.

With regard to linguistic form, this short exchange displays the dimension of fluid, heterogeneous languaging. The teacher and I practice here what I call ‘Khayelitshan languaging’: the routinised but not officially codified language practices of residents of the township Khayelitsha (Cape Town, South Africa) and of those who know how to language1 there. She refers to these language practices as ‘mixed’, while I describe them as heterogeneous throughout this work – as assembled from elements with various different histories, like almost, elokishini, i-, language or ama-, all present in this short exchange.

The way the teacher describes this languaging to me then exposes the dimension of homogenised nomolanguages: She says that the language of the township is ‘mixed with ilanguage yamaColoured, amaXhosa and the White’,2 presupposing language as divided into separate, named entities associated with population groups. In this case, ‘Afrikaans’ would be the nomolanguage of amaColoured, ‘Xhosa’ that of amaXhosa and ‘English’ that of Whites.3 Looked at closely this way, the quote shows how South African townships that are known for linguistic heterogeneity and fluidity (languaging) simultaneously co-constitute our wider social world where language is seen as split into homogeneous units: nomolanguages.

I use the prefix nomo-, inspired by ‘nominalis’ as ‘pertaining to a name or names’,4 because we normally distinguish named language units from the phenomenon language only by an article (‘a’ or ‘the’ language) or an -s (languages). Our commonsensical languaging therefore ties language closely to ‘a language’. Here, I want to foster a view that entangles language more closely with languaging and that positions nomolanguages as the outcome of linguistic, administrative and didactic sorting, writing and naming practices. The prefix continuously unsettles deeply entrenched ideas of separate nomolanguages as primordial entities and as necessarily and always definitive of the phenomenon language. With this terminology twist, I don’t wish to deny the existence and the social significance of nomolanguages but rather draw attention to the processes of their production.

Scott’s (1998) memorable phrase ‘seeing like a state’ helps to understand nomolanguages as products – and simultaneously producers – of a persistent vision of the social world as structured into simplified, homogeneous units that render the practices of populations legible, measurable and manipulable for state administrations and their agents. As Halberstam summarises:

for Scott, to ‘see like a state’ means to accept the order of things and to internalize them; it means that we begin to deploy and think with the logic of the superiority of orderliness. (Halberstam, 2011: 9)

Here, this orderliness is the ordering of language into nomolanguages. While this order of things that is produced and sustained by the statist5 vision clashes with the actual fluid languaging in places like Khayelitsha, it has nevertheless become so deeply internalised that every consideration of language, academic or not, tends to take it as its point of departure. That too we can read from the opening quote: the teacher describes the language of the township as ‘mixed’. In her account, as in most people’s, heterogeneous languaging emerges from the manipulation of nomolanguages. Accordingly, we can perceive linguistic heterogeneity because linguistically homogeneous units exist. Nomolanguages come first, languaging second. Homogeneity is the norm and heterogeneity the surprise. The directionality of this gaze is what I understand here by ‘seeing like a state’ (explained more in Chapter 2). But what if we saw things from the other side?

What becomes visible if we systematically turn the tables by ‘seeing’ languaging as normal and nomolanguages as surprising? The space that has prompted me to develop this vision is the Khayelitshan English classroom. The project proves, however, much easier to undertake than to accomplish, because I am myself caught in seeing language like a state – always, even if in ever more subtle ways, beginning my considerations from named boxes like Xhosa6 and English. Khayelitshan languaging strikes me as different, otherwise I would never have asked the question in the opening quote. That being said, my project here not only requires me to turn the tables but also literally to turn myself around, so that I walk – i.e. analyse and interpret the data – the other way. In the run-up to this book, however, I kept walking in circles, undermining my own project by reproducing the statist vision in my analyses.

I eventually figured out that it was the analytical terminology I used that kept implying things I didn’t want to say. Terms like ‘translation’, ‘non-standard language’, ‘mistake’ and even ‘translanguaging’, combined with the categorisation of every morpheme I wished to analyse as belonging to a nomolanguage or a nomolanguage family, made me see the data again like a state. What kept me in this loop was a conceptual conflation of linguistic features and nomolanguages (Section 2.1.2) that such terminology carries with it as a more or less explicit conceptual stowaway.7 In line with Sabino (2018: 114), who shows how our established analytical terminologies ‘limit our insights into human language’, I argue that this conceptual conflation makes us unable to reverse the statist gaze and to begin our theorisations from languaging as a baseline condition. Instead, the conflation between linguistic features and nomolanguages subtly forces us to accept nomolanguages as a starting point for any theorisation. Especially when using tools from classical linguistics (close morphological analysis for example), nomolanguages as an ordering principle of data are so enshrined in the discipline that it proves extremely hard not to accept them as analytical categories. How to get out then? I decided to trick myself into continuously walking the other way – even if that implied taking many detours when much more direct routes were available. The trick, the walk, the detours and what I got to see along the way constitute this book.

The trick was to actively constrain my thought-possibilities by not allowing myself to use in my analyses any of the linguistic terminology I identify as entangled in – and therefore reproductive of – the statist view of language. This thought experiment (details in Section 1.7) is the trick that helps me to keep walking the other way by forcing me into describing and analysing my empirical observations in Khayelitshan English classrooms differently. Walking the other way has itself to be read in two ways here: firstly, it means to walk into the other direction, and secondly, it means walking another way, another route that is constituted mainly by detours. These detours result from rigorously avoiding (or walking around) the terminology and conceptualisations that im- or explicitly carry with them the conflation of linguistic features and nomolanguages, i.e. the statist view of language.

Adopting a heuristic of detours (see Beck, 2015 for ‘Heuristik des Umwegs’) led me to search everywhere – not only in up-and-coming notions such as ‘translanguaging’ but also in ordinary and well­established terms such as ‘translation’ – for traces of seeing language like a state. This search is partly documented in this introduction but mostly in Chapter 2, where I argue which terms and concepts I will rigorously avoid in my data analyses and why. This approach inevitably leads me to detour from many existing conceptualisations of classroom language practices that rely on the terminology I here avoid. While this is certainly controversial and risky, I couldn’t shake my researcher’s intuition that the existing analytical lenses just weren’t leading me to the core of what was being done with language in the Khayelitshan English classrooms. Therefore, this book is the pursuit of the hypothesis that the phenomenon I observed could indeed not be described via the repertoire of existing theories. While putting me at risk of being proven completely wrong, this hypothesis also allowed me – or forced me – to develop some new analytical vocabulary and concepts. The new analytical language I propose is in close dialogue with contemporary work in socio- and applied linguistics that tries to think language in terms of spatial repertoires (Baynham & Lee, 2019; Canagarajah, 2018; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015) (Chapter 2).

This heuristic of detours is not meant to gainsay existing work on language practices in language classrooms. Rather, it allows me to take on a fresh perspective and to poke some taken-for-granted assumptions. I want to offer a competing set of ideas and concepts to those currently dominating discussions of homogenised linguistic fixity and heterogeneous fluidity in classrooms and beyond, such as code-switching or translanguaging. In Chapter 2, I will argue that the latter ultimately rely on the statist vision and make analysts look from nomolanguages to languaging.

After much talk about the walk, let’s go! I start by walking with the reader into Khayelitsha and its heterogeneous languaging, through its schools and their homogenised nomolanguages, through accounts of township (English) teaching into conceptual and methodological considerations. There, we learn about the detours taken in this work and come to eclectically build a possibly more suitable analytical lens for the data from Khayelitshan English classrooms. We then walk into these classrooms where Khayelitshan languaging and nomolanguages such as Standard English and (sometimes) Standard Xhosa meet, and where this study’s terrain between heterogeneous linguistic fluidity and homogenised fixity is constantly being constituted. We then walk back and forth between the classrooms and the conceptual considerations to test and adapt the analytical lens in light of the empirical findings. What we get to see along the way is the theory that I ultimately call relanguaging. This book is a constant oscillation between a concrete empirical example and theory building and I invite the reader to walk and see with me. For starters, we will see how the tension between languaging and nomolanguages plays out in South African township schools and how teaching and learning in these spaces is currently discussed in scholarship and beyond. Towards the end of this introduction, we return to a more detailed outline of the thought experiment I just sketched as the engine of this book.

1.2 The Languaging of the Township

The linguistic heterogeneity displayed in the opening quote is typical for Cape Town’s urban working-class settlements (Banda, 2018; Deumert, 2013; Dowling, 2011; Mesthrie & Hurst, 2013). Khayelitsha (ikhaya – home; elitsha – new: ‘New Home’), where this study is set, is the biggest of these townships, located approximately 30 km outside the city and founded in 1983. This explains its name ‘New Home’. It is the newest of Cape Town’s townships and the apartheid government’s last attempt to keep the growing Black population living outside the inner city. Apartheid died, Khayelitsha lives on. Today, with an officially counted 400,000 population (Frith, n.d.), but an estimated 1.2–2 million inhabitants,8 it remains a marker of Cape Town’s persistent socioeconomic and racial residential segregation.

Regarding language, most Kha...