Multilingualism and linguistic landscapes across space and time in the public railway system in South Africa: A multisemiotic analysis
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Date
2018
Authors
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Publisher
University of the Western Cape
Abstract
During apartheid, the infrastructure in South Africa was built by the government and
was designed to keep Blacks away from White areas. This infrastructure comprised
inter alia the public railway system which was intended to benefit mainly the White
minority population, as it momentarily allowed Blacks to provide the cheap labour
needed in White areas and businesses. While Whites predominantly resided within
the suburbs adjacent to the railways, Blacks were relegated to the outskirts of the
cities to areas which became known as townships and homelands. Racial segregation
was rigorously enforced and consequently, the signs displayed in trains and on
railway infrastructure primarily served to demarcate spaces and places that were
designated for use by either Whites or Blacks, respectively. Against this backdrop,
the main aim of this research was to present an ethnographic, multisemiotic study of
the linguistic landscape (LL) of the public railways in post-apartheid South Africa
across space and time. The study focussed on the languages used on signs displayed
in the individual research sites. A mixed-methods research design was employed
which entailed consideration of both quantitative and qualitative data. Thus, data was
collected during ethnographic fieldwork over a six month period and was analysed
using a multimodal/multisemiotic approach. The results reveal insights into the
social structuring of languages and the mobility of linguistic and semiotic resources
across regional and national boundaries in space and time since the end of apartheid.
Description
Philosophiae Doctor - PhD
Keywords
Apartheid, Dialogicality, Geosemiotics, Identity, Railways