During the pandemic, governments around the world had to implement innovative measures to ensure that lives were safe. Studies show that social media engagements between the South African government and the public soared during the Covid-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, openaccess social media platforms were rife with misinformation that infiltrated people's lives and spread rapidly throughout the nation. It is for that reason that the Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, Blade Nzimande, had to implement translanguaging as a multilingual strategy to combat the infodemic. This study examines the Minister's translingual segments and the responses made by students on YouTube after the Minister used African languages to clarify controversial topics. The researcher used the chat box on YouTube to observe and select translanguaging responses from the audience. This research argues that Minister Nzimande utilized a translingual strategy at various points in his briefings to prevent misinformation from spreading. In addition, the findings indicate that positive audience responses increased during the moments when the Minister translanguaged in an Indigenous language.
This paper reconsiders the status of what is normally described as deontic must in L1 South African English (SAE), presently understood as a medium-to-weak obligation marker in the grammar (Wasserman & van Rooy 2014). The paper focuses on two uses of the modal where an additional meaning of the speaker's desire and wish (for the addressee) parasites on the modal. These two uses also exhibit distinctive morphosyntactic behaviour. The first part of the paper presents recorded data and gives an informal descriptive account of the modal in the two cases of interest. The second part argues that, in these cases, must has undergone a process of change known as pragmaticalization, language change that leads into the discourse domain (Biberauer 2018; Diewald 2011; M & uuml;ller & Axel-Tober 2025). Tests from Coppock (2012) and Potts (2005) indicate that new discourse-related meaning has lexicalized into the content of the modal in each case, such that it is distinct from the medium-to-weak obligation marker. The paper finally considers the elements of meaning in these two cases that make must different from canonical deontic must, showing how the components of meaning in its canonical interpretation provide optimal material for the SAE interpretation evidenced in this paper. A new label for SAE must is then proposed for the modal.
The central argument of this paper is that it is misleading to adopt simple, homogeneous frameworks that are based on the traditional understanding of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism when examining the link between languages and colonization. The label colonial language is not a first-order phenomenon. Its meaning is not determined by how the main historical events unfolded. While narratives of colonialism vary from one country to another-and this lies beyond the scope of the present paper in spite of some empirical research undertaken-it may be argued that the term colonial language does not carry a universal meaning that can be applied across all national contexts. This article analyses some of the main socio-political events linked to languages which have unfolded in the South-West Indian Ocean Islands and which can shed light on the connection between languages and colonization-decolonization. The South-West Indian Ocean comprises several islands grouped into four island states (namely, Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius, and Seychelles) and two French island territories (namely, La R & eacute;union and Mayotte). The first section will show that there is no strict correspondence between colonization defined from a chronological and geographical/political perspective and the meanings attached to colonial languages. The second section will examine the construct of colonial languages which implies that colonial powers adopted a clear and stereotypical approach to languages in their colonies. The third section challenges the idea that there is a single colonial legacy in terms of the relationship between languages and society. In particular, the meanings that colonial languages can have in the contemporary era depend on changing contextual issues and socio-cultural mutations.
This article examines the linguistic landscape of a homosexual space (homoscape), specifically a gay sauna located in a major city in South Africa-one of the two openly homosexual male bathhouses in Africa. By using the embodied type of an autoethnographic method and couching the observations within the broader scholarship of linguistic landscapes, the author demonstrates that the South African homoscape complies with several characteristics of the homoscapes located in other countries and analysed in scholarship thus far. That is, signage indexes homosexual semiotics and produces a homospace/identity; signage has a restrictive effect on the homosexual landscape/identities; signage is multimodal (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile); English entertains a leading position in the signage; and graffiti is the most transgressive orthographic signage type used. Nevertheless, certain differences between the South African homoscape and the other documented homoscapes can also be observed. The most important of them is the absence of glocalization and any references to local African cultures and indigenous languages and, overall, a barely noticeable extent of multilingualism. The author concludes that the researcher's body can form part of a homoscape and argues for the ethically driven inclusion of researchers in their research as the objects of their study.
This study aimed to assess the extent to which the Writing Centre at a selected university in South Africa assists students in understanding the academic discourse utilised within the university sphere, especially regarding writing academic documents such as assignments. The academic socialisation model (Kumi-Yeboah, Brobbey and Smith 2020; Lea and Street 2006) was used as a theoretical framework for analysing the study’s findings. This involved extracting key concepts from the model and using them in the analysis. A qualitative research design was employed and data were collected through a sample of 60 evaluation forms provided to first-year students. These forms were used to assess the workshops attended by the participating students as hosted by the selected university’s Writing Centre. The sample included three groups of 20 students each, one group per different subject area, namely Introduction to Law, Management Studies, and Public Administration. The findings reveal that students benefit from the academic writing skills gained from the support services provided by the Writing Centre. However, the participants expressed a need to improve some methods by which the Writing Centre services are delivered to students. These findings suggest that the Writing Centre effectively provides academic writing skills to students, enabling them to learn academic discourse. Thus, the Writing Centre should enhance inducting students into the university culture’s standards and practices of academic writing, enabling them to use the academic discourse of the university or field of study and gain the capacity to learn the discourse independently.
