Becoming a public sociolinguist
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Date
2025
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Abstract
A major challenge facing South African sociolinguistics today is to find ways to engage with activists and be activists in reconstructing meaningful intervention in public debates about problems of language and multilingualism in a post-apartheid democratic context. To tackle this problem, in this chapter, I propose the idea that sociolinguists doing the work of activism, with language activists, in the public, are (1) invested in the artistic representation of linkages between language reinvention and new relationalities, and (2) highlighting, documenting and framing interventionist debates around language. To illustrate this idea, and the related points, I draw on my activist work with Afrikaaps ‘language’ activists in the advancement of a public sociolinguistics that concern two broad strategies of intervention: one as a form of rear-guard intervention and the other as a vanguard one. I analyze how activists working with the Afrikaaps ‘language’ movement concerns developing a new perspective on language based in actions of reinvention and the goal of establishing common relationality through multilingual communication. Following the analysis, I offer a number of conclusions on how public sociolinguists could continue to cultivate and sustain such activism embedded in the history of language formation, reinvention and future
Description
Keywords
Activism, Afrikaaps, Hip Hop South Africa, Multilingualism, Sociolinguistics
Citation
Williams, Q. (2025) ‘Becoming a Public Sociolinguist’, in C. Cutler, U. Røyneland, and Z. Vrzić (eds.) Language Activism: The Role of Scholars in Linguistic Reform and Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 165–180.