"This volume explores the ambiguity of English as an academic lingua franca, focusing on the post-colonial university context in South Africa toward offering broader insights on ELF and EMI in the global South. The book adopts an intersectional approach to ethnicity and race, gender, and language which highlights the ways in which linguistic resources form identities in a multilingual ELF university context, one which raises critical questions around power, ideology, and identity. The volume also showcases the multiplicity and variability of Englishes in African academic contexts through its ethnographic accounts of South African universities, toward challenging long-held concepts underpinning existing ELF research, highlighting theory being done in the global South, and promoting strategies for English language learning and teaching that counteracts the marginalization of multilingual speakers. Offering a multidisciplinary critical contribution to the research on English as an academic lingua franca, this book will be of interest to students and researchers in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, ELF and EMI studies, World Englishes, and African studies"--
Grounded in ethnography, this monograph explores the ambiguity of English as a lingua franca by focusing on identity politics of language and race in contemporary South Africa.
Grounded in ethnography, this monograph explores the ambiguity of English as a lingua franca by focusing on identity politics of language and race in contemporary South Africa. The book adopts a multidisciplinary approach which highlights how ways of speaking English constructs identities in a multilingual context. Focusing primarily on isiZulu and Afrikaans speakers, it raises critical questions around power and ideology. The study draws from literature on English as a lingua franca, raciolinguistics, and the cultural politics of English and dialogues between these fields. It challenges long-held concepts underpinning existing research from the global North by highlighting how they do not transfer and apply to identity politics of language in South Africa. It sketches out how these struggles for belonging are reflected in marginalisation and empowerment and a vast range of local, global and glocal trajectories. Ultimately, it offers a first lens through which global scholarship on English as a lingua franca can be decolonised in terms of disciplinary limitations, geopolitical orientations and a focus on the politics of race that characterize the use of English as a lingua franca all over the world. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, World Englishes, ELF and African studies.
