Preamble

Exactly 10 years prior to the publication of this book, in 2007, a group of us met at a workshop on linguistic citizenship convened at the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town. This was one of a series of three workshops that were held in South Africa and Sweden, and that brought together common threads and activities of two research and development projects that were inaugurated at the initiative of Kathleen Heugh and myself, and in which we participated as the principal researchers. Both projects were funded by the then Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation with Developing Countries (SAREC), the Swedish International Development Cooperation Authority (SIDA) and the National Research Foundation (NRF) South Africa. The collaborative projects under which the workshops fell were:

• • Multilingualism in an Integrated View of Development: Democracy, Human Rights and Citizenship (a joint UWC–SAREC project in which the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and Stockholm University collaborated).

• • Representations and Practices of Multilingualism in a Transformative South Africa: Language, Identity and Change in a South African Educational Institution (a joint SIDA–NRF project, in which UWC, the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and Stockholm University collaborated).

The first meeting had taken place two years earlier in February 2005, and had been attended by an eminent list of wise elders in the field of language policy, planning and education from across Africa, Australia, Europe and South-East Asia. The title of that event was ‘Workshop on Multilingualism in Development: Education in an Integrated Society’.

The intention with the workshop was to explore the role of multilingualism across a range of fields, such as democracy, health and economy, and to discuss how language education (both formal and informal) could contribute to a more integrative treatment of these issues.