Since European powers set foot on the African continent, native inhabitants there have been struggling with linguistic and cultural imperialism, and the progress to full decolonization has only been sluggish. From a language policy perspective, this edited volume demonstrates that the way to facilitate this arduous process is through harnessing the transformative power of language in the transition towards knowledge societies. It brings together twenty-eight scholars via eighteen chapters to discuss the South African experience in creating the necessary multilingual environments for such needed transformation.
Following the editors’ introduction, the chapters are organized into four sections. The first section, which includes three chapters, centers on the notion of language as a transformative and decolonial tool in university settings. Theodore Rodrigues's (chapter 2) contribution presents an interesting case study of the ways engineering students at a South African university utilize their multilingual resources to challenge the established monolingual academic practice and thereby contribute to a change in the curriculum and teaching pedagogy.
The second section, consisting of six chapters, homes in on the ‘intellectualization’ of African languages—that is, processes of language planning, development, and revalorization of disempowered languages—amid the ideological antagonism between indigenous African languages and European languages. The chapters look at these processes in a wide range of social domains, including education, law, and finance. The study by Menzi Zamokwakhe Thango & Wisdom Ntando Moyo (chapter 9) explores language usage in the banking sector. They show that, despite legislative efforts to achieve multilingualism, there is a hegemonic English banking culture, with English being the ‘language of business’, and this is due to the fact that English remains the sole language of instruction in South African schools.
The third section, with four chapters, points to digital literacy as a central part of this intellectualization project. The turn to digitalization requires not only hardware and infrastructure, but also the computational resources that support the numerous languages in South Africa. Laurette Pretorius & Friedel Wolff's examination (chapter 11) of the presence of multilingual resources on Wikipedia suggests that the online platform enables individuals to take ownership of their language in knowledge production and provides a bottom-up approach to language planning, which, in turn, facilitates the implementation of policies for multilingualism in various forms of government.
The final section, also with four chapters, turns to the role of translation and interpretation in practicing multilingualism. While these are essential steps in promoting the growth and visibility of minoritized languages, they should be done in a way that is sensitive to the cultural context of the target language. Janet Hayward's work (chapter 14) demonstrates the value of documenting and translating local oral histories in research, rather than solely relying on contemporary perception of race and identity from the Western academic tradition.
While the editors are upfront about their focus on the South African context, the insights presented in this volume are likely to be valuable for other, perhaps more deprived and disempowered, societies in Africa and in the Global South in navigating postcolonial language hierarchies.
