Research Articles (Linguistics)

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dalawhatyoumust: Kaaps, translingualism and linguistic citizenship in Cape Town, South Africa
(Discourse, Context & Media, 2023) Toyer, Zaib; Peck, Amiena
In 2016 Wayde Van Niekerk, a South African athlete of mixed-race heritage won an Olympic gold medal. In South Africa, his win caused hashtags such as #proudlysouthafrican, #blackexcellence and #colouredexcellence to trend online. By and large, these hashtags index the ongoing competitive discourses regarding nationalism, race and culture in Cape Town (cf. Author, 2018). Amongst these hashtags, however, was #dalawhatyoumust, a Kaaps hashtag generally meaning to �do what needs to be done�. Unlike the aforementioned hashtags, this one seems to cross the linguistic and racial divide despite its strong associations with Coloured1 people on the Cape Flats. The seemingly effortless uptake of this hashtag by diverse South Africans suggest that it has somehow become unmoored of its ethnic and linguistic inception. We explore the use of this Kaaps hashtag as a form of translingual practice which is affect-laden and trans portable across and between diverse users online and which promotes a particular �cool Capetonian� culture. Analyzing select posts from the #dalawhatyoumust thread on Facebook, we provide a nuanced look at #dala whatyoumust as an uplifting genre which proleptically advises nameless viewers of the importance of selfactualization, determination and aspiration. Additionally, we include Goffman�s (1974) framing foundation to investigate how positivistic discourse has been rhizomatically taken up by a �realm� of implicit collective users online. This research interrogates long-held ideological boundaries between Kaaps and legitimized Standard Afrikaans and standard English. We conclude with a focus on Kaaps hashtags as semiotic acts of Linguistic Citizenship (cf. Williams and Stroud, 2013) which allows for the conjoining of Kaaps with diverse audiences, complex trajectories, and an assortment of accompanying semiotics. Following Stroud (2018:3) we argue that this Kaaps hashtag has become a form of languaging that facilitates ��the building of broad affinities of speakers that cut across�divisions and borders, and that negotiate co-existence/co-habitation outside of common ground in recognition of equivocation�. In South Africa, division was the order of the day and when we explore contemporary ordinary moments posted by heterogenous users using #dalawhatyoumust (henceforth #dwym) we aim to explore the ordinariness of languaging which brings people together despite their race, linguistic background, and ethnicity, that is to say an affinity of �cool Capetonian� style.
The centre for multilingualism and diversities research at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa
(University of the Western Cape, 2014) Stroud, Christopher
There is an urgency in theorising how diversity is negotiated, communicated, and disputed as a matter of everyday ordinariness that is compounded by the clear linkages between diversity, transformation, voice, agency, poverty and health. The way in which difference is categorised, semiotised and reconfigured in multiple languages across quotidian encounters and in public and media forums is a central dynamic in how poverty and disadvantage are distributed and reproduced across social and racial categorisations. In the South African context, finding ways of productively harnessing diversity in the building of a better society must be a priority. The South African context with its history of apartheid and on-going contemporary post-apartheid transformation is a veritable laboratory for the study of forms of conflict and conviviality in diversity. South Africa is a society characterised by historical displacements and contemporary mobilities, both social and demographic, where a large part of people�s daily life involves negotiating diversity, dislocation, relocation and anomie, while at the same time attempting to pursue aspirations of mobility in a context of continuing inequity.
Streaming difference(s): Netflix and the branding of diversity
(SAGE Publications, 2023) Asmar, Axelle; Raats, Tim; Van Audenhove, Leo
Since 2020, Netflix has emphasised the diversity of representation the platform provides through its content. Following the publication of its diversity report, the streamer positions itself as a driver of inclusion for underrepresented communities in film and television industries. This article examines how Netflix rhetorically frames the emphasis on diversity in its corporate communication. Based on a thematic analysis of Netflix�s press releases, it explores how Netflix uses its branding of diversity to generate a transnational appeal. The article outlines four strategies which highlight the cultural and industrial practices deployed by the streamer to gain competitive advantages. In 2021, Netflix published its first diversity report detailing the make-up of its talents across all US commissioned films and series released between 2018 and 2019. The report shows that, overall, Netflix is outpacing the global entertainment industry with regards to the representation and inclusion of underrepresented groups.
Legitimization and recontextualization of languages: The imbalance of powers in a multilingual landscape
(John Benjamins Publishing company, 2023) Simungala, Gabriel; Jimaima, Hambaba
We use the uneven distribution of languages in the public spaces of the University of Zambia and the voices and narratives that emerge to argue for legitimization and recontextualization as critical components in the presence and contestations of languages. Using data from interviews and photographs of signage in place, we show legitimization of foreign languages in which English, Japanese, and Chinese forge a place of linguistic contestation and legitimization through control and superiority. We argue for the apparent hegemony of foreign languages and the striking paucity of monolingual signage of indigenous languages as the imbalance of powers. While the former shows the influence of the global in the local, the prospects for the latter continue to diminish as their chances and opportunities as linguistic capital for wider/global communication do not look so favourable. We conclude with the glaring reality of recontextualization as capital for the display of indigenous inclined discourses
�� Oi, oi! � you must go by the right path�: Mofolo�s Chaka revisited via the original text
(University of Pretoria, 2016) Krog, Antjie
Thomas Mofolo never defended himself against accusations that his novel Chaka distorts historical facts to express anti-Nguni sentiments under the guise of Christianity. But in a way he foreshadowed the possibility of it, by including as part of his novel a sentence which has become one of his most analysed: �But since it is not our purpose to recount all the affairs of his [Chaka�s] life, we have chosen only one part which suits our present purpose�. Mofolo does not elaborate on what he means by �our present purpose�, but simply continues with the story. By focusing on the original Sesotho text, indigenous Zulu customs, African philosophy and the diversions from historical facts, this article explores other possibilities for what could have been Mofolo�s �present purpose�.
Birds and bees, the �r� word and zuma�s p*nis: censorship avoidance strategies in a south african online newspaper�s comments section
(Springerlink, 2019) Mokwena, Lorato
Although linguistic practices in online platforms continue to receive fair scholarly attention, limited research has been conducted on online censorship avoidance strategies in South Africa about online newspapers. We use notions of semiotic remediation on comments on two articles on a nude painting of former South African President Jacob Zuma in a popular South African online publication, SowetanLive, to show how the commentators creatively avoid censorship and to operationalise their right of freedom of expression. Particularly, we show the various ways commentators transform and recontexatualise existing semiotic affordances of punctuation marks, letters, digits, South African English, indigenous South African languages and cultural knowledge to achieve new and extended meanings while simultaneously avoiding censorship
Corpus-based interpreting studies: Early work and future prospects
(Frontiers Media S.A., 2022) Bendazzoli, Claudio; Sandrelli, Annalisa
This manuscript investigates to what extent the use of corpora could help translation trainees while translating from Arabic into English and vice versa. Forty Yemeni trainees, who were enrolled in an advanced course in Arabic-English translation during the academic year 2020, participated in the study. They participated in translation projects from which the data for this study was collected, using thinking aloud protocols and computational observation. The translation process was investigated using the translation process software Transalog, an eye-tracking software and the screen recording software Screen-O-Matic. This kind of computational observation enabled a researcher to discover the extent to which the participants were able to employ corpora in their translation projects. At the end of the study, the participants were given a questionnaire with the aim of finding out their perceptions toward the use of corpora in their translation projects, and toward the project-based training approach adopted in the study. The findings of the translation process indicated that the trainees employed various kinds of corpora in their translation projects. Results from the questionnaire showed that the trainees have very positive attitudes toward the progress in their instrumental translation sub-competence, the utilization of corpora tools, and the project-based training approach adopted in this study.
Diagnostic assessment of academic reading: Peeping into students� annotated texts
(MDPI, 2022) Antia, Bassey E.; Vogt, Karin
Text annotations are literacy practices that are not uncommon in the reading experience of university students. Annotations may be multilingual, monolingual, or multimodal. Despite their enormous diagnostic potentials, annotations have not been widely investigated for what they can reveal about the cognitive processes that are involved in academic reading. In other words, there has been limited exploration of the insights that signs (verbal and non-verbal) inscribed by students on texts offer for understanding and intervening in their academic reading practices. The aim of this exploratory study is to examine the diagnostic assessment potentials of student-annotated texts. On the basis of text annotations obtained from teacher trainee students (n = 7) enrolled at a German university, we seek to understand what different students attend to while reading, what their problem-solving strategies are, what languages and other semiotic systems they deploy, what their level of engagement with text is, and, critically, how the foregoing provide a basis for intervening to validate, reinforce, correct, or teach certain reading skills and practices. Theoretically, the study is undergirded by the notion of text movability. Data suggestive of how students journey through text are argued to have implications for understanding and teaching how they manage attention, use dictionaries, own text meaning, and appraise text.
Why is inflectional morphology difficult to borrow?�Distributing and lexicalizing plural allomorphy in pennsylvania Dutch
(2021) Fisher, Rose; David, Natvig; Pretorius, Erin; Michael T, Michael T
: In this article we examine the allomorphic variation found in Pennsylvania Dutch plurality. In spite of over 250 years of variable contact with English, Pennsylvania Dutch plural allomorphy has remained largely distinct from English, except for a number of loan words and borrowings from English. Adopting a One Feature-One Head (OFOH) Architecture that interprets licit syntactic objects as spans, we argue that plurality is distributed across different ? root-types, resulting in stored lexical-trees (L-spans) in the bilingual mental lexicon. We expand the traditional feature inventory to be �mixed,� consisting of both semantically-grounded features as well as �pure� morphological features. A key claim of our analysis is that the s-exponent in Pennsylvania Dutch shares a syntactic representation for native and English-origin ? roots, although it is distinct from a �monolingual� English representation. Finally, we highlight how our treatment of plurality in Pennsylvania Dutch, and allomorphic variation more generally, makes predictions about the nature of bilingual morphosyntactic representations.
Why is inflectional morphology difficult to borrow?�Distributing and lexicalizing plural allomorphy in Pennsylvania Dutch
(MDPI, 2022) Fisher, Rose; Natvig, David; Pretorius, Erin
In this article we examine the allomorphic variation found in Pennsylvania Dutch plurality. In spite of over 250 years of variable contact with English, Pennsylvania Dutch plural allomorphy has remained largely distinct from English, except for a number of loan words and borrowings from English. Adopting a One Feature-One Head (OFOH) Architecture that interprets licit syntactic objects as spans, we argue that plurality is distributed across different root-types, resulting in stored lexical-trees (L-spans) in the bilingual mental lexicon. We expand the traditional feature inventory to be �mixed,� consisting of both semantically-grounded features as well as �pure� morphological features.
�Kom Khoi San, kry trug jou land�: Disrupting White Settler Colonial Logics of Language, Race, and Land with Afrikaaps
(Wiley, 2021) Williams, Q; Alim, H.S; Haupt, A; Jansen, E
This article offers a broad and deep discussion of critical issues in the study of language, race, and political economy through an analysis of the verbal art, aesthetics, and performances of South African hip hop artists. In particular, we present an in-depth analysis of the Afrikaaps language movement in Cape Town, South Africa and theorize the language-race-land complex, the range of issues with respect to the co-constitution and refusal of the colonial logics of language, race, and land. Specifically, we address the Afrikaaps language movement in Cape Town, South Africa. Afrikaaps is a South African hiphopera that disrupts white settler colonial logics of language, race, and land through an interrogation and revision of white supremacist constructions of Afrikaans. This reinvention of language, race, and land frees the Afrikaans-speaking, so-called Coloured community from oppressive, colonial logics and offers them new ways of envisioning their linguistic, racial, spatial, and political-economic futures. We argue that, for the artists�activists involved in this decolonial, raciolinguistic movement, Hip Hop becomes a critical vehicle for raising consciousness through language, foregrounding Indigenous knowledge systems, and upending the white supremacist legacies of apartheid through a radical re-education. Methodologically, we center Black and Indigenous artists� voices, understanding them to be more than cultural producers but also cultural theorists. We draw upon our longitudinal, ethnographic cultural engagement with the Hip Hop artists involved in the theatre production and related forms of language activism (Alim & Haupt 2015, 2017; Haupt 2012; Haupt et al. 2019; Jansen 2019; Jansen et al. 2019; Stroud & Williams 2017; Williams 2018), as well as language and media analyses of the Afrikaaps production, soundtrack, and documentary film (Valley 2010). � 2021 American Anthropological Association
�The Gwarrie Call that they Recognise�: An analysis of the translated Sesotho poem �Ntwa ea Jeremane 1914� (War against Germany 1914) by BM Khaketla (1913�2001)
(Taylor and Francis, 2021) Krog, Antjie
This essay looks at a recently translated poem, �Ntwa ea Jeremane 1914�, written by BM Khaketla, as a lens through which to approach the feelings and attitudes of people from Lesotho towards the world wars. A poem is sometimes described as a gathering of spoken or written words, arranged in such a way that it evokes an intense imaginative alertness around an issue, an emotion or an experience. Investigations into the participation of black South Africans in the world wars mainly rest on official archival documentation, with attention focused on the racial, socio-economic context and the post-war treatment of soldiers. Distinction is seldom made between black South Africans and those from Lesotho (or Swaziland or Botswana) as they were all drafted under the South African contingents. There has been little discussion in South African art about why black people joined the Allied forces during the world wars, with the prominence of the sinking of the SS Mendi a wonderful exception as it reverberates in SEK Mqhayi's famous poem, �Ukutshona kuka Mendi�, as well as Fred Khumalo's recent novel, Dancing the Death Drill (2017). The visual artist William Kentridge has also commemorated the death of very large numbers of black Africans in the First World War in his powerful exhibition, The Head and the Load. This article explores the expression of emotions and conclusions about the world wars in a poem by Khaketla, as well as the techniques he uses to carry these across larger vistas.
Language ideology, policy and classroom practices in Oshiwambo speaking areas, Northern Namibia
(University of Western Cape, 2020) Iipinge, Kristof; Banda, Felix
The study problematized language ideologies and policy to explore the efficacy of using English as the Language of Learning and Teaching (LOLT) among Oshiwambo speaking learners in the Omusati region of Northern Namibia. Focus group interviews with ESL teachers, interviews with the English Head of Departments (HODs), classroom observations and informal chats with the grade 12 learners were carried out at six secondary schools. The study finds that students struggle to partake in meaningful classroom interaction and to comprehend instruction and content in English. Although students may express themselves better in Oshiwambo, they are not allowed. Some ESL teachers would use Oshiwambo to maintain order in class, but avoid using Oshiwambo to help struggling learners believing this would negatively impact learners� English proficiency. Some ESL teachers were also found to blame ESL content subject teachers for learners� poor English proficiency, as they used Oshiwambo in class to teach and explain content. We conclude that ESL classroom practice is teacher-centred by default, and students are muted as they find themselves with no voice to express themselves efficiently and efficaciously, and deaf to classroom content delivered in an unfamiliar language, English.
Multilingualism as racialization
(University of Western Cape, 2021) Richardson, Jason; Stroud, Christopher
South African today remains a nation torn by violence and racial inequity. One of major challenges for its people is to create new futures across historically constituted racial divides, by finding ways to engage with each other across difference. In this regard, multilingualism holds out the promise of offering a way of bridging difference and opening spaces for engagement and empathy with Others. Today contemporary constructs of multilingualism, both in policy and everyday practice, continue to reinforce racialized divisions inherited from historical uses of language as a tool of colonialism, and a mechanism of governmentality in apartheid, the system of exploitation and state sanctioned institutional racism. In this paper we seek to demonstrate how multilingualism has always been, and remains today, an �epistemic� site for managing constructed racialized diversity. In order to do so we trace periods of South Africa�s history. By way of conclusion, we suggest that alternative linguistic orders require a decolonial rethinking of the role of language(s) in epistemic, social and political life.
Voicing sentiments of resilience: A corpus approach to 1980s conscious rappers in South Africa
(AOSIS, 2021) �lvarez-Mosquera, Pedro; Visagie, Pejamauro T.
The study of people�s response to adversity acquires substantially different connotations in the South African context because of the heavy legacy of apartheid. This article explores the construction of the notion of resilience through the oral narrative production of the most prominent conscious rappers that emerged in the 1980s in South Africa, namely Prophets of Da City and Black Noise. By means of a corpus approach, our analysis with AntConc revealed that resilience is intrinsically connected to the historical sociopolitical struggle of the black group. In building this notion, results show how the parallel emergence of an oppressive other, the white group, plays a fundamental role. Relevant to our study, the affirmation of their black identity appears to act as an effective way of underpinning their possibility of resurgence. Furthermore, the objective analysis of rappers� linguistic choices in their lyrics underlines their strategic use of personal pronouns, ethnic labels and other contextual-loaded terms whilst conveying their messages and communicating with their audience. These results both demonstrate the contribution of rap music in construction of a specific notion of resilience and highlight the effectiveness of this methodological approach, opening the floor to comparative studies.
Towards a technology-enhanced blended approach for teaching Arabic for Shari�ah purposes (ASP) in the light of the South African national qualifications framework
(International Journal of Information and Education Technology, 2021) Mohammed, Tawffeek A. S.; Al-Sowaidi, B.; Banda, Felix
The study investigates the use of a blended learning approach for teaching Arabic as a foreign language at a South African Islamic college in the light of the South African National Qualifications Framework level descriptors and their critical cross-field outcomes. In particular, the approach has been used for teaching a Module in an undergraduate BA programme during the second semester of the academic year 2018-2019 at the International Peace College South Africa (IPSA). The college adopts a content and language integrated approach for teaching Arabic. The study concluded that the use of a technology-enhanced blended approach using Web 2.0 tools and Learning Tools (with full) Interoperability (LTI 2.0) (e.g. gamification) plays a vital role in motivating the learners and in the achievement of critical cross-field outcomes of each NQF level including, subject knowledge, critical thinking and problem solving, communication, teamwork and self-management among others. The study is part of an action research project that also includes the design of a syllabus for teaching Arabic for S ri� purposes in the South African context and the attitudes of learners towards it.
Performing rap ciphas in late-modern Cape Town: Extreme locality and multilingual citizenship
(Brill, 2010) Williams, Quentin E.; Stroud, Christopher
The study of hip-hop in Cape Town, and indeed South Africa, has traditionally focused on the narratives and poetics of resistance, race and counter-hegemonic agency in the context of apartheid and the early days of post-apartheid. Despite this attention, hip-hop cipha performances remain relatively under-researched. The aim of this paper is to suggest that cipha performances display linguistic and discursive features that not only are of particular interest to rap music and hip-hop on the Cape Flats of Cape Town specifically, but that also engage core issues around multilingualism, agency and voice more generally. It demonstrates how in the process of entextualization a sense oflocality, extreme locality, emerges in cipha performances by means of verbal cueing, representing place, expressing disrespect (dissing), and the (deictic) reference to local coordinates that is achieved by transposing or recontextualizing transidiomatic phrases, and by incorporating local proxemics and audience reactions through commentary and response. It concludes by suggesting that competition around acceptable linguistic forms and framings (metalinguistic disputes) of extreme locality comprise the very micro-processes behind the formation of new registers. At the same time, these registers create the semiotic space for the exercise of agency and voice through multilingual practices, that is, multilingual citizenship.
Talking parts, talking back: Fleshing out linguistic citizenship
(UNICAMP, 2020) Stroud, Christopher; Williams, Quentin; Bontiya, Ndimphiwe
These are the bodies of children and men and women who have inherited the brutalities of colonialism, plantation servitude and slavery and now re-live these miseries in the belly of a rampant global neoliberal and patriarchal capitalism. They are the racialized, sexualized, genderized and godless bodies that first took form in coloniality-modernity in conjunction with the emergence of MAN, the White, rational, disembodied male as HUMAN. They retain their shape today through technologies of vulnerability, with which the manufactured lack of voice works in dynamic synergy. This is particularly the case for South Africa, with its tender histories and distraught presents, raw emotion and sore vulnerabilities of racialized and neoliberal patriarchy. In this paper, we suggest that vulnerability, beyond its potentially devastating effect on souls and livelihoods, may also be a productive site for the articulation of alternative, and habitually silenced voices. In this regard, we explore how a focus on acts of Linguistic Citizenship may orientate thinking on voice and agency to different sites of the body, as well as allow insight into the complex technologies and practices of vulnerability.
Factors 2 and 3: Towards a principled approach
(Universitat Aut�noma de Barcelona, 2019) Biberauer, Theresa
This paper seeks to make progress in our understanding of the non-UG components of Chomsky�s (2005) Three Factors model. In relation to the input (Factor 2), I argue for the need to formu-late a suitably precise hypothesis about which aspects of the input will qualify as �intake� and, hence, serve as the basis for grammar construction. In relation to Factor 3, I highlight a specific cognitive bias that appears well motivated outside of language, while also having wide-ranging consequences for our understanding of how I-language grammars are constructed, and why they should have the crosslinguistically comparable form that generativists have always argued human languages have. This is Maximise Minimal Means (MMM). I demonstrate how its incorporation into our model of grammar acquisition facilitates understanding of diverse facts about natural language typology, acquisition, both in �stable� and �unstable� contexts, and also the ways in which linguistic systems may change over time.
Translating conceptual qur�anic metaphor: A cogno-translational approach
(Richtmann Publishing Ltd, 2021) Al-Sowaidi, B; Mohammed, T; Banda, F
This study will investigate metaphor translation as a natural phenomenon. It will analyze some of the problems involving the translation of metaphorical expressions in two Qur�anic translations, namely, Yusuf Ali's The Holy Qur�an: Text, Translation and Commentary and Laleh Mehree Bakhtiar's The Sublime Qur�an. The analysis in this study employs both quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as a cognitive framework of metaphor, which helps conciliate the cultural specificity of metaphors and their transference into linguistically and culturally unrelated languages. The present analysis is based on Mandelblit�s Cognitive Translation Hypothesizes (CTH) (Mandelblit (1995), Maalej�s strategies of translating metaphor (Maalej, 2002, 2008) and K�vecses�s concept of Cultural Variation (K�vecses, 2002,2006).

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