lang policy in sa

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The language policy / language economicsinterface and mother-tongue education in

post-apartheid South Africa

Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu

Howard University

This article examines the issue of mother-tongue education in South Africa

against the background of the interface between the country’s language

policy and language economics, a field of study whose focus is on the theo-

retical and empirical analysis of the ways in which linguistic and economic

variables influence one another. The article argues that because education

plays such an important role in employment and in gaining access to politi-

cal power, mother tongue education — or its denial — is as important asany other aspects, political and economic planning among them, with which

South African policy-makers appear to be mostly concerned. The article

draws attention to two key issues in language economics, namely (i) the

relevance of language as a defining element of economic processes such as

production, distribution and consumption; and (ii) the relevance of lan-

guage as an element, in the acquisition of which individual actors may have a

good reason to invest. It warns that unless these issues are taken into account

in policy (re)formulation, mother tongue education will never break

through. In conclusion, the paper considers the implications of policy failurevis-à-vis mother tongue education, with a focus on current language shift

towards English especially in urban African communities.

The problem

In 1994 South Africa liberated itself from apartheid and adopted a multilingual

language policy giving official recognition to eleven languages: English and

Afrikaans, previously the only two official languages of the state, and nine

African languages namely Zulu Xhosa Ndebele Swati Sotho Tswana Pedi



132 Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu

to promote the status of African languages by using them in the higher domains

such as education, the media, and government administration. Research reportson language use in these and other areas suggest that the policy has not achieved

its objectives (e.g., Hibbert 1998; Kamwangamalu 2000, 2001; Reagan 2001).

On the contrary, English and Afrikaans remain central to the administration of

the state and its institutions, including education, much as they were in the

apartheid era. If anything has changed at all in the use of these two languages in

the higher domains, it is that English has now become far more powerful than

Afrikaans and has assumed an unassailable position to the extent that none of

its co-official languages can match it. As the Minister of Education, ProfessorKader Asmal, puts it, “the new language policy is not working for all official

languages; the tides seem to be turning increasingly in favor of English” (Daily

News, 8 May 2001). This state of affairs raises a number of questions: How does

one promote multilingualism in education, for instance, if African languages

are confined only to the first four years of primary education rather than used

as media of instruction throughout the entire educational system? How does

one promote African languages as media of instruction in the entire educational

system against the stigma of inferior languages which was attributed to them in

the apartheid era as a result of the legacy of Bantu Education (to which I shall

return shortly)? How does one prevent the emergence of a society in which, as

Peirce (1992) warns, power is concentrated in a minority of the country’s

population who have had access to English-medium education?

It seems that the prevalent use of English and Afrikaans in the higher

domains such as education is sustained mostly by the socioeconomic value with

which these two languages are associated in the South African linguistic market

place and, in the case of English, beyond it. In this paper I discuss the link

between language and the economy, for this has hardly been acknowledged norseriously considered in efforts to implement the new language policy. I argue

that if African languages are to be accepted, even by their own speakers, as a

viable medium of instruction throughout the entire educational system, they

must be given the buying power that English and Afrikaans have in the South

African linguistic market place. Put differently, the key argument of the paper

is that for the new language policy to achieve its intended goal to promote

African languages, these languages must become what may be termed social and

economic mobilisers (Xiao 1998), that is, they must be vested with at least some

of the material privileges and perquisites that are currently shared by only

English and Afrikaans Like these two languages the African languages must



Mother-tongue education 133

participation, and of upward social mobility (Webb 1995). Unless the new

language policy is revised and geared towards these targets, efforts to promotethe indigenous languages will be doomed to failure, despite the country’s

constitutional commitment to multilingualism.

Research into the economics of language planning (e.g., Ager 2001; Cooper

1989; Bourdieu 1991; Coulmas 1992; Grin 1994, 1996a, 1996b, 2001) suggests

that there is a need to rethink the new language policy with a view to adopting

a more pragmatic, decentralised and market-oriented approach to language

planning. The article will be organised as follows. The next section concentrates

on the perennial debate around the issue of the medium of instruction. Itattempts to contextualise what some have negatively characterised as “the myth

of the mother tongue” (Ferguson 1992; Winkler 1997) against the background

of South Africa’s past language policies, especially the Bantu Education Act of

1953. This is intended to explain why the concept of mother tongue, or mother

tongue education for that matter, is central to the on-going debate around

South Africa’s new language-in-education policy; and to provide the back-

ground against which current negative attitudes towards the use of African

languages as media of learning and teaching can be understood better. The

subsequent section addresses the link between language and the economy. It

suggests that such a link is vital if the new language policy is to achieve its

objective to promote African languages as media of learning and teaching. The

last section considers the implications of language policy failure for the indige-

nous African languages, with a focus on current language shift from majority

African languages such as Zulu to English especially in urban black communi-

ties. I argue that the shift to English is a by-product of language policy failure on

the one hand, and is deeply embedded in the economic power of English vis-à-

vis the indigenous African languages on the other.

Mother tongue education and Bantu Education Act

The debate around the issue of the medium of instruction, or, in “South-Africa-

speak,” the “language of learning and teaching,” has been going on since the

country liberated itself from apartheid in 1994. On the one hand, the renewed

interest in mother tongue education appears to derive from the finding,documented in several studies around the world, that pupils perform better at

school when they are taught through the medium of their mother tongue rather




Auerbach 1993). On the other hand, such renewed interest in the question of

mother tongue education, observes Kamanda (2002), is informed by UNESCO’s model of mother tongue literacy (UNESCO 1953), reviewed

recently by Tabouret-Keller and others (1997). UNESCO ([1953] 1995) defines

mother tongue education as “education which uses as its medium of instruction

a person’s mother tongue, that is, the language which a person has acquired in

early years and which normally has become his natural instrument of thought

and communication.”

The concept of mother tongue has been controversial. As Ricento observes

(2002:1–2), it is not always easy to determine a person’s mother tongue,particularly in multilingual societies, in which children are raised to speak a

language that is not the native language of either parent or of their speech

communities, or in which children grow up being exposed to several languages

within the family or the wider community. Winkler (1997) also questions the

usefulness of the concept of mother tongue in multilingual urban settings. In

her study aimed to determine the mother tongue of students at Maryvale

College in Johannesburg, Winkler shows that the majority of students at the

College grow up in a multilingual home without a language that could clearly

be identified as mother tongue. Similarly, Ferguson remarks that “much of the

world’s verbal communication takes place by means of languages that are not

the users’ ‘mother tongue,’ but their second, third, or nth language, acquired

one way or another and used when appropriate” (1992:xiii). This point can be

illustrated with the following extract from Mesthrie’s interview with a twenty-

three-year-old student from Germiston (Johannesburg) about the languages in

which he is proficient:

My father’s home language was Swazi, and my mother’s home language was

Tswana. But as I grew up in a Zulu-speaking area we used mainly Zulu and

Swazi at home. But from my mother’s side I also learnt Tswana well. In my

high school I came into contact with lots of Sotho and Tswana students, so I

can speak these two languages well. (Quoted in Mesthrie 1995: xvi)

It is not clear what the mother tongue of the twenty-three-old student from

Germiston could be. Against this background, Ferguson suggests (1992:xiii) that

the whole mystique of “mother tongue” should be dropped from the linguist’s set

of professional myths about language. Canagarajah (2002:107) concurs, arguing

that constructs such as “mother tongue” should be abandoned, for they are“misleading … essentialist, static and unitary”. Pennycook (2002) expresses




However, unlike Ferguson, Canagarajah, and others (e.g., Braine 1998; Singh

1998), Pennycook argues that “we should understand such a construct as ‘astrategically essentialist argument’,” one that, as Canagarajah puts it, “has its

uses in the exercise of power” (2002:108). Against this background, I argue that

to appreciate the construct of “mother tongue,” one must understand (and this

is a very important point) the social history and socio-political context in which

it is embedded. Likewise, as Cooper remarks, “language planning cannot be

understood apart from its social context or apart from the history which

produced that context” (1989:182). This is what Harold Schiffman (1996:5) has

termed a polity’s “linguistic culture,” that is, “the set of behaviours, assump-tions, cultural forms, prejudices, folk belief systems, attitudes, stereotypes, ways

of thinking about language, and religio-historical circumstances associated with

a particular language.” Put differently, as Schiffman notes (1996: 22), “language

policies do not evolve ex nihilo; they are not taken off a shelf, dusted off, and

plugged into a particular polity; rather, they are cultural constructs , and are

rooted in and evolve from historical elements of many kinds, some explicit and

overt, some implicit and covert.”

In the context of the “old” South Africa, the whole machinery of the

apartheid regime operated mostly on the basis of deliberate, politically motivat-

ed promotion of “mother tongue,” especially in education. The campaign for

mother tongue education was driven by the church and by the apartheid

government’s philosophy of Christian Nationalism. Christian Nationalism

propagated notions of the separate identity and development of each volk

(people) and of the God-given responsibility of the Afrikaner volk to spread the

gospel to the native inhabitants of Africa and to act as their guardians (Shingler

1973). Engelbrecht observes that the basic values of this philosophy — among

them the promotion of a Christian philosophy of life with the emphasis onCalvinistic beliefs, support for the principle of nationalism (a national ideal,

traditions, religion and cultures), mother tongue instruction and parental

involvement in education — reinforced the doctrine of separate provision of

education for groups of people with different languages, religion and cultures

(Engelbrecht 1992:499). In support of this philosophy and especially the notion

of mother tongue education, the church preached that “God had willed it that

there [should] be separate nations each with its own language and that, there-

fore, mother tongue education was the will of God” (Malherbe 1977:101). With

the church’s backing, the apartheid regime saw to it that every ethnic group was

educated in their own mother tongue So language became a yardstick for




isiZulu-medium schools, isiXhosa mother-tongue speakers had to be educated

in isiXhosa-medium schools, the Whites of British descent had to be schooledin English-medium schools, and their Dutch-descended counterparts had to be

schooled in Afrikaans-medium schools. What distinguished mother-tongue

education for the Whites from mother tongue education for the Blacks was that

the former was an education with a difference: it was intended to promote

white interests, to ensure that the white segment of South Africa’s population

had access not only to the languages of power, English and Afrikaans, but also

to the privileges with which these languages were associated.

To achieve these objectives, in 1953 the apartheid government introducedlegislation known as the Bantu Education Act . Briefly, at the heart of this policy

was, among other things, (a) the dire determination by the apartheid regime to

reduce the influence of English in black schools; (b) the imposition in these

schools of the use of both Afrikaans and English on an equal basis as media of

instruction; and (c) the extension of mother-tongue education from grade 4 to

grade 8 purposely to promote the philosophy of Christian Nationalism as

described previously.

The black pupils resisted this policy. They saw education in their own

mother tongue as a dead end, a barrier to more advanced learning and a lure to

self-destruction. Also, they saw such an education as a trap designed by the

apartheid government to ensure that the black pupils did not acquire sufficient

command of the high-status languages (English and Afrikaans) for it would

enable them to compete with their white counterparts for well-paying jobs and

prestigious career options (Alexander 1997:84). It seems that under apartheid

mother-tongue education was intended, as Smith (1987, cited in Pennycook

[2002]: 16) would put it, to serve “the requirements of those who provided it

rather than those for whom it was provided,” that is the black pupils. The blackpupils’ resistance to the Bantu Education Act and the apartheid regime’s

determination to impose it led to the bloody Soweto uprisings of 16 June 1976.

These uprisings resulted in two particularly undesired outcomes: they boosted

the status of an already powerful language, English, over both Afrikaans and

African languages in black schools and in black communities at large, and they

led the African people to equate education in their own languages with inferior

education. Since those ill-fated events of June 1976 mother-tongue education

in African languages became stigmatised in South Africa and (this is a very

important point) that stigma lingers on to this day.




So the demand for English-medium education, and not for “mother

tongue” education in an African language has to be understood against thebackground of the socio-economic power and international status of English on

the one hand and of the legacy of the policy of Bantu education on the other.

Also, in post-apartheid South Africa there is no sustained demand for multilin-

gual skills for sociocultural, academic and administrative purposes. Conse-

quently, as Verhoef (1998) remarks, for African pupils there is no alternative to

English-medium education. The demand for English-medium education is

exacerbated by the fact that black pupils are only too well aware of the social,

economic and political power of English to ask for education in any otherlanguage, and by the fact that their own languages have no economic cachet

either locally or internationally. As a background to the discussion that follows,

I would like to return to the questions I raised earlier: How does one promote

multilingualism in education if African languages are not used as media of

instruction throughout the entire educational system? How does one promote

African languages as media of instruction against the stigma left by the Bantu

Education Act? If the new language policy is not working for all official languag-

es, and if the tides seem to be turning increasingly in favor of English (e.g.,

Daily News, 8 May 2001), how does one prevent the emergence of a society in

which, as Peirce warns (1992:6), power is concentrated in a minority of

speakers of English? In the section that follows I argue that if the new language

policy is to achieve its primary goal to promote the use of the indigenous

African languages in the educational system, policy makers need to seriously

consider the link, thus far neglected or deliberately overlooked, between

language and the economy and approach the issue of mother-tongue education

in African languages as a marketing problem.

Mother-tongue education as language marketing

The discussion in this section draws on the theories of the economics of

language, also known as “language economics,” to make the case for the

promotion of African languages especially in education. Language economics,

as a field of research, mainly focuses on the theoretical and empirical analysis of

the ways in which linguistic and economic variables influence one another(Grin 2001:68). Some of the issues raised in “language economics” that are

relevant to this paper include the following:




i. the relevance of language as a defining element of economic processes such

as production, distribution and consumption;ii. the relevance of language as an element, in the acquisition of which individ-

ual actors may have a good reason to invest;

iii. language teaching as a social investment, yielding net benefits (market-

related or not);

iv. the economic implications (costs and benefits) of language policies,

whether these costs and benefits are market-related or not.

(Grin 2001:66)

Within the framework of language economics, linguistic products such aslanguage, language varieties, utterances, and accents are seen as goods or

commodities to which the market assigns a value (Bourdieu 1991, Coulmas

1992). The term “market” refers to the social context in which linguistic

products are used. On a given linguistic market, some products are valued more

highly than others. The market value of a linguistic product such as the mother

tongue is determined in relation to other languages in the planetary economy

(Coulmas 1992:77–85). It is, as Gideon Strauss (1996:9) notes, an index of the

functional appreciation of the language by the relevant community. Against thisbackground, I would like to argue that for the mother tongue to succeed in

education, that is, for it to function alongside English and Afrikaans as a

valuable medium of education, the issue must be treated as a marketing

problem. Essentially, says Dominguez (1998:4, after Torres and Cordoba), all

marketing action consists of placing the most ideal product (product policy) in

the adequate place and moment (distribution policy), at the convenient price

(price policy) causing consumer demand with the most efficacious means

(promotion policy).

Along these lines, as Cooper (1989:72) would put it, viewing mother-

tongue education as a marketing problem entails “developing the right product

backed by the right promotion and put in the right place at the right price .”

Concerning the product , Cooper says that language planners must recognise,

identify, or design products which the potential consumer will find attractive.

These products are to be defined and audiences targeted on the basis of (empir-

ically determined) consumer needs. Dominguez concurs, noting that the product

is “the solution of a problem” or “what meets a conscious or unconscious need”

(1998:1). Promotion of a communicative innovation such as language refers toefforts to induce potential users to adopt it, whether adoption is viewed as aware-




promotion deals with communicating the benefits that a product or service

carries and persuading the market to buy it (Dominguez 1998: 7). For instance,the fact that access/promotion to certain jobs requires a language qualification,

says Dominguez, has a very visible economic component. Place refers to the

provision of adequate channels of distribution and response. That is, a person

motivated to buy a product must know where to find it (Cooper 1989: 78). And

the price of a consumer product is viewed as the key to determining the

product’s appeals to the consumers (Cooper 1989:79).

Drawing on the foregoing discussion, it seems that in the South African

context the product , that is the African languages, and the place where theselanguages are spoken can easily be identified. One knows, for instance, that

Zulu is the demographically dominant language in the province of KwaZulu-

Natal; whereas Xhosa has this status in the Eastern Cape. Therefore, the issue of

marketing mother-tongue education hinges not so much on the product or the

place , but rather on the promotion and price of the product (i.e., indigenous

languages) in the linguistic market place. It is worth recalling that linguistic

products are also goods to which the market assigns a value, and that “on a

given linguistic market, some products are valued more highly than others”

(Bourdieu 1991: 18). In this regard, African communities find English in

particular more appealing than the indigenous languages because of the

economic value with which English is associated in the linguistic market place.

Yet the link between language and economy, as far as African languages are

concerned, has hardly been taken into consideration in language policy deci-

sions. For the mother tongue to also become appealing, it must be assigned an

economic value in the linguistic market place. This entails meeting three

conditions. First, there is the need to vest the mother tongue with some of the

privileges, prestige, power and material gains that have been for so longassociated with English and Afrikaans. Second, the use of the mother tongue

should be extended to the higher domains such as education, economy and the

government and administration which, as if apartheid never died, remain under

the monopoly of English and Afrikaans. Third, a certified (i.e., school-acquired)

knowledge of the mother tongue should become one of the criteria for access to

employment in the private as well as the public sector.

Meeting these three conditions does not necessarily mean removing English

and Afrikaans from, or diminishing their status in, the higher domains such as

education. It simply means creating conditions under which the mother tongue

can compete with English and Afrikaans in at least the South African linguistic




not so much whether or not the mother tongue should be used as a medium of

learning. Rather, the consumer is interested in the outcome of an education inan indigenous language and how this would compare materially with the

outcome of an education in English or Afrikaans. For instance, would an

education through the medium of an indigenous African language ensure the

language consumer socio-economic self-advancement? Would that education

enhance the language consumer’s standard of living? Would it give the language

consumer a competitive edge in the employment market? Or, put differently, what

benefits would individualsactually reap, particularlyon thelabor market, because

of their skills in the mother tongue? And how would these benefits compare to thebenefits deriving from the skills in a language such as English or Afrikaans? (Grin

1995:227–231). AsI haveobserved elsewhere (Kamwangamalu 1997:245),itdoes

not take long for the language consumer to realise, first, that education in an

African language does not ensure one social mobility and better socioeconomic

life; second, that those who can afford it, and among them policy-makers

themselves, send their children to schools where the medium of instruction is

English; and, third, that when all is told, only education in English opens doors

to the outside world as well as to high-paying jobs that an education in the

medium of an African language does not open at the moment.

Conclusion

This paper has attempted to make the case for mother-tongue education in

South Africa, with a focus on the indigenous African languages. This it has done

against the background of the country’s past language policies, especially the

Bantu Education Act. The success of mother-tongue education will depend onmany variables including the availability of human and financial resources, the

political will, and people’s attitudes which, in turn, are dependent on the pay-

off of mother-tongue education. But as Tollefson (1991) observes pointedly,

only when the language achieves a full range of functions and no stigma is

attached to its use has it arrived. For African languages “to arrive,” black South

Africans, whose languages have been marginalised for centuries, need to know

what an education in their own languages would do for them in terms of

upward social mobility. Would it, for instance be as rewarding as, say, English-or Afrikaans-medium education? Black South Africans would not support or

strive to have an education through the medium of an African language even




unless it was given a real cachet in the broader political and economic context.

Alternatively, the demand for education in the medium of English will continueto grow, especially as humans “like to put butter on both sides of their bread —

and if possible a little jam as well” (D’Souza 1996:259).

As the demand for English increases, the few African mothers who have

knowledge of this much sought-after commodity (i.e., English) will, as Kwesiga

puts it, “start teaching their children English before they are born” (1994:58).

This is because languages, as Fishman, Cooper, and Conrad say (1977:115), are

rarely acquired for their own sake. They are acquired as keys to other things that

are desired in life. As I have observed elsewhere (e.g., Kamwangamalu2003:236), in the context of South Africa these “other things” include the desire

to have access to employment, which now generally requires knowledge of

English; and the desire to move up the social ladder and identify with the power

elite (St. Clair 1982:173), whose language practices involve extensive use of

English, the current language of rule, power and prestige, a language with no

sell-by date attached to it (Pakir 1998)andoneinwhich,as Lynn (1995) puts it, the

elite reproduces itself. It is not surprising that for most black people in South Africa

English has become the sole open sesame by means of they and their children in

particular can achieve unlimited vertical social mobility (Lynn, 1995:55).

As for the African languages, they are shunned by their own speakers

because they carry the status of inferior language, a stigma with which they were

associated in the apartheid era as a result of the Bantu education Act. Because

of this stigma, and because African languages have no cachet in the economic

context, there has resulted what Crowley (1996) has termed pragmatic language

shift to English especially among the younger generations of black South

Africans in urban communities. As much as one would like to agree with the

view, expressed by Laurence Wright, that “no part of South Africa is, inprinciple, going to permit its children to be divorced from their home language

and culture” (2002:173), the reality is that the contrary is already happening, as

documented by de Klerk (2000), Bowerman (2000) and Kamwangamalu (2003)

for language shift in urban centers in the Eastern Cape, Western Cape and

KwaZulu-Natal, respectively. These studies show that black parents consciously

forbid their children to speak an African language in favor of English in the

home, a domain that Fasold (1984) describes as the last bastion of a subordinate

language, in this case an African language, in competition with a dominant

language of wider currency, English. It is, therefore, of essence that policy

makers acknowledge the link between language and the economy After all as




language as a social phenomenon lies at the heart of the economics of language.

Unless the status of African languages is improved along the lines suggested inthis article, language shift to English will accelerate and will be unstoppable.

Whether policy-makers will heed this warning remains to be seen.

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Mu cikoso

Cididi ca mwakulu ne ca bubanji ne malu a kulongesha mu miakulu ya bankambwa kunyima kwa apatede mu Afrike wa kwinshi

Mu dibeji edi ndi ngakula bwalu bwa kulongesha mu miakulu ya bankambwa mu Afrike wa

kwinshi. Bamfumu ba Afrike wa kwinshi badi bapita kutuma ntema yabo yonso ku malu a




dinene dindi ngamba mu dibeji edi didi ne, nansha bamfumu ba ditunga bikala bakula malu

a cididi ne a bubanji bwa ditunga, ki mbimpe bwa bobo kulengulula malu adi atangilamiakulu ya bakambwa bwalu miakulu eyi idi ne mushinga mukole mu nsombelu yetu.

Nanku bidi bikengela ne miakulu eyi bayilongesha bana mu tulasa. Kadi bwa baledi kwitaba

ne bana babo balonga mu miakulu ya bankambwa, bidi bikengela ne bamanya cidi bana

bapeta kunyima kwa dilonga mu miakulu eyi. Cianana bantu ne bela miakulu ya bankambwa

nyima. Ku ndekelu kwa dibeji ndi ngakula bwa bubi budi mwa kulwila miakulu ya

bankambwa padi aba badi bayakula bayilengulula. Ne mpita kushindika meji anyi pa malu

a dishintulula dia mwakulu adi enzeka nangananga mu bimenga mudi bana betu bafika

basombela, bwalu bidi bimweka ne mu bimenga emu bafika bakadi balekela miakulu ya

bankambwa bwa kwakula amu angele.

Resumo

La lingvopolitika-lingvoekonomika interfrontig ˆo kaj patrinlingva edukado enSudafriko post Rasapartigo

Tiu ci artikolo ekzamenas la demandon pri patrinlingva edukado en Sudafriko antau la fono

de la interfrontigo inter la lingvopolitiko de la lando kaj lingvoekonomiko, tiu studkampo,

kiu fokusigas je teoria kaj empiria analizo de la manieroj, lau kiuj lingvaj kaj ekonomiaj

variantoj influas inter si. La artikolo argumentas, ke, pro tio, ke edukado ludas tiel gravan

rolon en dungigo kaj en kapto de aliro al politika povo, patrinlingva edukado — au gia

rifuzigo — egale gravas kiel aliaj aspektoj (inter ili politika kaj ekonomia planado), kiuj sajne

plej multe koncernas sudafrikajn politikofarantojn. La artikolo atentigas pri du slosilaj

demandoj de lingvoekonomiko, nome (i) la graveco de la lingvo kiel difina elemento en

ekonomiaj procedoj, kiel ekzemple produktado, distribuado kaj konsumado; kaj (ii) la

graveco de la lingvo kiel elemento, en kies akirado la individuaj agantoj havas bonan kialon

por investi. Gi avertas, ke, krom se oni prenos en konsideron tiujn demandojn en

(re)formulado de politikoj, patrinlingva edukado neniam trabatos. Konklude, la refera jo

konsideras la implicojn de politika malsukceso rilate al patrinlingva edukado, fokuse je la

aktuala lingvosovigo lau la direkto de la angla, precipe en urbaj komunumoj afrikaj.

Author’s address

Howard University

Department of English

248 Locke Hall

2441 6th Street, N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20059,

U S [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]





About the author

Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu, associate professor of English and linguistics at Howard

University, has taught linguistics at the National University of Singapore, the University of

Swaziland, and the University of Natal, where he was professor and director of the Linguistics

Program. His research interests include multilingualism, code-switching, language policy and

planning, language and identity, New Englishes, and African linguistics. He has published

widely in these areas, is the author of a recent monograph The Language Planning Situation

in South Africa (2001), and has guest-edited special issues on this and related topics for The

International Journal of the Sociology of Language (2000), Multilingua (1998), and World

Englishes (2002).






















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