Editorial

This fourteenth special issue of Language Matters on language politics in Africa somehow departs from previous issues by bringing together a larger variety of articles covering themes that deal with the intricate relation between language politics and, respectively, language policy, ideology, and the linguistic landscape. A final article deals with language variation.

The first three contributions deal with the relation between language policy and language politics. In the first of these articles, Pfuurai Chimbunde and Maserole Kgari-Masondo are concerned with the prevailing problems of decolonising language policies and their role in the fight against linguicide and the quest for non-Eurocentric paradigms. In their article, the authors evaluate the progress made thus far in decolonising the use of African languages in southern African countries in answering the decolonial call and its challenges. Using the decolonisation lens and document analysis, they utilise South Africa and Zimbabwe as case studies in assessing the urgency of the effort. The authors propose tentative actions that go beyond the rhetoric and writings of the decolonisation agenda. In the second article, Isaac Mumpande and Lawrie Barnes depart from the notion that endangered speech communities are often misconstrued as homogeneous and willing to fight and die for their languages. Using three schools of thought on language revitalisation, namely the Proponents, the Pessimists, and the Opponents, the authors examine how internal and external challenges affected the language revitalisation initiative of the endangered Tonga speech community in Zimbabwe. Among the six factors which obstructed the process of Tonga revitalisation, the most significant ones were the lack of a standardised variety of Tonga, the legacy of discriminatory language policies in Zimbabwe and the opposition of politicians. The authors reveal that endangered speech communities are intricate heterogeneous entities in which competing interests may jeopardise the revitalisation process. In the third article, Theodorus du Plessis considers the implications of the Constitutional Review Committee’s 2017 recommendation that the South African Constitution be amended to include South African Sign Language (SASL) as one of the country’s official languages. His article essentially focuses on the impact of the national officialisation in 1994 of the historically marginalised indigenous languages alongside English and Afrikaans in comparison to the significant advance of SASL as a unique minority language since 1996. Du Plessis identifies some language planning anomalies and provides a perspective on the structural limitations regarding language officialisation in South Africa and considers the implications thereof for SASL.

The next two articles of this issue deal with the relation between ideology and language politics. In the first of these articles, Pimelo Ngidi Madoda Cekiso and Peter Mandende are interested in what persuasion techniques the former South African president, Nelson Mandela, employed in his State of the Nation Addresses and in how he used language to profile his political ideologies. Two speeches presented by former President Mandela in 1994 and 1999 provided the data for their study. The authors studied these texts within a qualitative framework by making use of content analysis. Their results show that the former president utilised specific narrative constructs such as “restoration of human dignity for all South Africans,” “freedom of the individual,” “taking care of the poor,” and “a better life for all” as persuasion techniques in convincing his audiences and in transmitting his ideologies. The second of these articles, by God’sgift Uwen and Eyo Mensah explores the expressive use of slang and jargon by officers and men of the Nigerian Army in a bid to construct social identity, enforce discipline, and conform to work ethics. They adopt linguistic ideology and community of practice theories, complemented by the notion of style as performance, to provide analytical frameworks for understanding military subjectivities and attitudes represented by these emblematic linguistic resources. Data were sourced through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 30 participants. The authors found that military slang and jargon help ease communication between officers and men as they index power, enhance solidarity, facilitate inclusion (and exclusion), and promote varied military subcultures. They conclude that situated language practices provide a site for linguistic creativity and the enactment of style that sustain meaningful relationships between personnel in the arm, offering strong social capital in defining collective identities and professional belonging.

The third theme of this issue deals with the relation between language politics and the linguistic landscape. In the first article on this theme, Pedro Álvarez-Mosquera and Frieda Coetzee explore the linguistic landscapes (LLs) of semi-informal markets in townships in the Tshwane (Pretoria) Metropolis of South Africa. Like other urban African markets, these LLs operate in a context of longstanding and ever-changing multilingualism and multiculturalism dominated by the colonial language, in this case English. The analysis draws on the semiotic reading of the LLs by residents regarding the indexicality of traders’ names. Local sign writers provide insight into their instrumental role in shaping the LLs of these areas. The authors also draw on the notions of emplacement, spatial scope, and assemblages of semiotics to discuss the significance of mobile phone numbers in unregulated, potentially high-risk activities. In the second article on this theme, Victor Chikaipa analyses slogans and mottos inscribed on bicycle taxis operating in Malawi. He examines how bicycle taxis—a microcosm of the everyday mode of transport—and their slogans—which represent underlying socio-cultural meanings—become platforms where texts are transformed for expanded production and consumption of meaning. The author collected 150 unique slogans from bicycle taxis situated at different ranks throughout Malawi, used in-depth interviews with taxi owners and a qualitative thematic method for his analysis of data collected. His findings reveal that slogans and mottos are syncretic creative socio-cultural symbols and styles which the operators use to express their innermost feelings and ideologically link their identities to specific cultures. Slogans on bicycle taxis are a larger linguistic landscape of varied transformed meanings revolving around salient topics of lifetime experiences, the sociopolitical economy and linguistic diversity in Malawi.

In the last article of this issue, Steyn Madlome and Crous Hlungwani study the phonological and semantic differences between the Tsonga spoken in South Africa and Zimbabwe from a Labovian perspective using a comparative approach. Interviews were conducted among 20 Tsonga first language speakers from Zimbabwe and South Africa, supported by document analysis. The authors discuss differences in the places of articulation of consonants found in certain lexical items, highlighting phonological processes such as labialisation versus palatalisation, velarisation versus labialisation, nasalisation versus non-nasalisation, and aspiration versus non-aspiration. Semantic variations are also discussed. They found that there are phonological and semantic similarities and differences between the Tsonga spoken in Zimbabwe and South Africa, respectively.

The variety of contributions to this, the third issue of Language Matters of 2022, illustrates the complexity of language politics and discourses on the languages of Africa.