Relanguaging: sorting things out and bringing things together in Khayelitshan English classrooms

ABSTRACT

The practices of sorting things out and bringing things together, which I summarise under the term relanguaging, sit between fluid, situated languaging practices and the administrative standard grid in education that relies on bounded, named languages. Relanguaging, I argue, was invisible to socio- and applied linguists’ analytical vision because of a tendency to set named languages as the norm. This led to questions about switching between or transcending languages but not about producing and dissolving them. Together with two English teachers in Khayelitsha, South Africa, I instead set fluid languaging practices as the analytical norm to then investigate the relationship between such fluidity and (administratively) fixed languages. The language classrooms I focus on then emerge as one of the production sites of named languages – here of English. English teachers (sometimes in collaboration with their students) sort out extremely complex spatial repertoires with various heterogeneous linguistic resources to produce English as a recognisable, teachable and learnable entity. The reflections I present suggest a different idea of how language classrooms work (also in settings beyond Khayelitsha) but they also open up (language) philosophical questions about the ontology of linguistic features and how they come to be English (or not).

KEYWORDS:

• Relanguaging
• translanguaging
• spatial repertoire
• English teaching
• language ideology

Acknowledgements

I thank Mastin Prinsloo and Rose Marie Beck for their careful reading of this paper and for their extremely helpful comments. I also greatly appreciated the comments of the two anonymous reviewers who have helped in finetuning the argument of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Terms like ‘Coloured’, ‘White’ and ‘Black’ are an apartheid remnant that still reflects local language use with reference to South Africa's different population groups. I use such terms in this book without racist intention. ‘Black’ is used for persons of African descent, ’Coloured’ for persons of KhoiSan or Cape Malay descent or mixed race, and ’White’ indicates European descent.

2 See Makoni and Mashiri (2007) for an illustration of how so-called ‘African indigenous languages’ have been codified and standardised by European Christian missionaries and are therefore in part colonial constructions themselves and not some primordial ‘African reality’.

3 We can, in this case, straightforwardly translate her listing of population groups into nomolanguages: amaColoured = Afrikaans, amaXhosa = Xhosa, the White = English.

4 The man agreed, yes, it is an eagle, but I have trained it to be a chicken. I have already trained it because it should change into what? A chicken. It shall be a chicken, it shall no longer be an eagle. He says it is no longer an eagle. It is no longer an eagle, now it is already what? It's already a chicken. Why? Because I have trained it. I have trained it because it shall stop being an eagle and be a chicken. For five years, a man has kept this eagle with the chicken, so that it will change its ways of being the eagle to a, to become a chicken.

5 Look on the first paragraph. Look for the word which has the same meaning as angry. ‘Angry’, the meaning is there in the first paragraph. Write angry, I want its meaning.