Family language policy in a xenophobic context: The case of Kalanga transnational families in South Africa
- Authors: Maseko, Busani , Nkomo, Dion
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468053 , vital:77003 , ISBN , https://hdl.handle.net/10413/23289
- Description: Due to globalisation and people’s mobility, transnational families have become a common feature worldwide. As they settle in host countries, a diminished need and opportunities to use their heritage languages usually follow. This tendency places pressure on immigrant languages, particularly in countries that do not support their teaching in education. In highly ethnicised and racialised contexts like South Africa, parents’ transnational experiences impact decisions regarding language use in identity construction in the host country. This study examines the family language policies of three transnational Zimbabwean Kalanga families in South Africa. It reveals how their language transactions, negotiations and contestations are enmeshed with considerations of the everpresent xenophobic sentiment in South African society. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with parents from three focal Zimbabwean families of Kalanga heritage. The findings show that parents’ experiences of xenophobia in South Africa shape their language acquisition decisions for their children in considerable ways. The preference for acquiring and using Zulu and English at the expense of Kalanga is motivated by parents’ desire and aspiration for their children’s assimilation into a South African identity to minimise exposure to xenophobic attacks, for children’s schooling and general upward social mobility.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2024
- Authors: Maseko, Busani , Nkomo, Dion
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468053 , vital:77003 , ISBN , https://hdl.handle.net/10413/23289
- Description: Due to globalisation and people’s mobility, transnational families have become a common feature worldwide. As they settle in host countries, a diminished need and opportunities to use their heritage languages usually follow. This tendency places pressure on immigrant languages, particularly in countries that do not support their teaching in education. In highly ethnicised and racialised contexts like South Africa, parents’ transnational experiences impact decisions regarding language use in identity construction in the host country. This study examines the family language policies of three transnational Zimbabwean Kalanga families in South Africa. It reveals how their language transactions, negotiations and contestations are enmeshed with considerations of the everpresent xenophobic sentiment in South African society. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with parents from three focal Zimbabwean families of Kalanga heritage. The findings show that parents’ experiences of xenophobia in South Africa shape their language acquisition decisions for their children in considerable ways. The preference for acquiring and using Zulu and English at the expense of Kalanga is motivated by parents’ desire and aspiration for their children’s assimilation into a South African identity to minimise exposure to xenophobic attacks, for children’s schooling and general upward social mobility.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2024
Power to the minorities: Ndebele L1–speaking teachers in Tonga-speaking communities in Zimbabwe
- Authors: Maseko, Busani , Nkomo, Dion
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468064 , vital:77004 , ISBN 9781003299547 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003299547-2/power-minorities-busani-maseko-dion-nkomo
- Description: In 2013, Zimbabwe adopted a new constitution that declared 16 officially recognised languages. In line with the new constitutional provision that all the official languages be treated with parity, the teaching of minority languages ceased to be optional. Yet there were neither trained teachers nor educational materials to implement their teaching. In this chapter, it is examined how Ndebele L1 teachers and learners in the Tonga-speaking community of Binga negotiate their identities by learning Tonga. Ndebele L1 learners learn Tonga as the new legitimate Indigenous language offered in their schools, which brings interesting dynamics in terms of language learning challenges and attitudes. Ndebele L1 teachers must reinvent themselves to assume the instructional responsibilities in the learning of the minority language and to retain their jobs. These teachers therefore learn the languages from the community including their own learners, thereby providing an exciting case of speakers of majority language speakers learning a minority language that they also must teach. This study therefore presents an interesting case where minority language–speaking learners and majority language–speaking teachers collaboratively and reciprocally participate in the teaching of the minority language.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2024
- Authors: Maseko, Busani , Nkomo, Dion
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468064 , vital:77004 , ISBN 9781003299547 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003299547-2/power-minorities-busani-maseko-dion-nkomo
- Description: In 2013, Zimbabwe adopted a new constitution that declared 16 officially recognised languages. In line with the new constitutional provision that all the official languages be treated with parity, the teaching of minority languages ceased to be optional. Yet there were neither trained teachers nor educational materials to implement their teaching. In this chapter, it is examined how Ndebele L1 teachers and learners in the Tonga-speaking community of Binga negotiate their identities by learning Tonga. Ndebele L1 learners learn Tonga as the new legitimate Indigenous language offered in their schools, which brings interesting dynamics in terms of language learning challenges and attitudes. Ndebele L1 teachers must reinvent themselves to assume the instructional responsibilities in the learning of the minority language and to retain their jobs. These teachers therefore learn the languages from the community including their own learners, thereby providing an exciting case of speakers of majority language speakers learning a minority language that they also must teach. This study therefore presents an interesting case where minority language–speaking learners and majority language–speaking teachers collaboratively and reciprocally participate in the teaching of the minority language.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2024
The linguistic dimensions of Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe
- Authors: Maseko, Busani , Nkomo, Dion
- Date: 2022
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468075 , vital:77005 , ISBN 9781779224286
- Description: This chapter explores the linguistic dimensions of Gukurahundi to ad-dress claims that the operation was anything other than a genocide. When discussing genocide, Lang (2020) reveals the connection be-tween genocidal acts and language. Writing on the Nazi Holocaust, Lang (2020: 155) lays bare the nexus between genocides and lan-guage. To escape the consequences of language, for worse or for bet-ter, would require an impossible step outside history for its speakers or writers no less than for its audience–and whatever else we discover about the Nazi genocide. The background to this claim is broader than the specific evidence of the role of language in the Nazi genocide. The existence of a causal relation between language and history, between linguistic practice and events in the social context, would be disputed only on the view of language as neutral and transparent medium. Tes-timony comes from many different sources of the history of language as ‘real’history, evolving in direct relation to features of the historical and social context. On general grounds, it is predictable that linguistic de-velopments which occurred at the time of Nazi genocide would disclose features resembling those of the process of genocide itself; it would be difficult to understand how the latter might occur without corresponding changes in language (Lang 2020: 155).
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2022
- Authors: Maseko, Busani , Nkomo, Dion
- Date: 2022
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468075 , vital:77005 , ISBN 9781779224286
- Description: This chapter explores the linguistic dimensions of Gukurahundi to ad-dress claims that the operation was anything other than a genocide. When discussing genocide, Lang (2020) reveals the connection be-tween genocidal acts and language. Writing on the Nazi Holocaust, Lang (2020: 155) lays bare the nexus between genocides and lan-guage. To escape the consequences of language, for worse or for bet-ter, would require an impossible step outside history for its speakers or writers no less than for its audience–and whatever else we discover about the Nazi genocide. The background to this claim is broader than the specific evidence of the role of language in the Nazi genocide. The existence of a causal relation between language and history, between linguistic practice and events in the social context, would be disputed only on the view of language as neutral and transparent medium. Tes-timony comes from many different sources of the history of language as ‘real’history, evolving in direct relation to features of the historical and social context. On general grounds, it is predictable that linguistic de-velopments which occurred at the time of Nazi genocide would disclose features resembling those of the process of genocide itself; it would be difficult to understand how the latter might occur without corresponding changes in language (Lang 2020: 155).
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2022
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