The dominant position of neo-liberal monolingual medium of instruction practices has created myths and fallacies about the utility of English as the sole language of skills development and training in South Africa. With a specific focus on Further Education and Training (FET) colleges, this position paper motivates for multilingual medium of instruction models as an alternative that aligns with a progressive agenda for South African skills development. The paper challenges those conventional and predominant approaches that inform the FET college skills development system in South Africa. In their stead, this paper suggests epistemological imaginations that take into account the social fabric and the diverse skills needs of the wider South African society.

The previous body of sociolinguistics literature is replete with historical accounts of the arrival of the English language in southern Africa (see, for example, Lanham 1982; Gough 1995; Branford 1996; Kamwangamalu 2002; Meierkord 2005). These studies indicate that English-speaking people made initial contact with southern Africa prior to the period of formal British colonization of the region. According to Gough (1995: 1), English explorers and traders who visited southern Africa from as early as the sixteenth century introduced a vocabulary of the English language describing the land and peoples they had come into contact with.

This thesis is a critical exposition of communication strategies employed by cross-border traders (CBTs) during their trade activities at selected border sites in Southern Africa. The study spotlights the innovative ways by which CBTs circumvent nationally imposed language policies and practices that are a barrier to their communication during trade and, consequently, to their survival in the trade arena. Because modernist standard language ideological frameworks currently dominate the field of linguistic conceptualization and language definition, language practices of transient communities such as cross-border traders remain under-theorized and least appreciated. This thesis, therefore, challenges mainstream conceptualizations of language and their role in shaping simplistic ideas on language. The singular most important innovation of the thesis lies in that it moves away from abstracted notions of language and emphasizes those grounded elements of language that were extrapolated from real language settings and traceable actions of CBTs. Furthermore, the study contributes new theoretical insights on language redefinition and reconceptualization by drawing on observable on-site language practices of cross-border traders at selected Southern African borders and borderlands. What is it that enables the economic trade activities of these 'informal' cross-border traders to thrive in the face of linguistic diversity and nation-state controls? To address this question, the study used data from on-site observable language practices of CBTs as basis for suggesting an alternative philosophy of language and communication. In searching for alternative linguistic trajectories, a revisionist decoloniality epistemology was adopted in framing the theoretical underpinnings of the study. The new alternative linguistic trajectories suggested in the study, point to the need for the redefinition and re-conceptualization of what we mean by language.

Mainstream academic conversations in sociolinguistics and language education policy have for a long time questioned the deep-seated habit of assuming monolingualism as the norm for all individuals and societies - what has been termed the monolingual mindset. However, most research has done so using modernist linguistic ideologies that perpetuate myths about the nature of language. Consequently, there still remain strong pockets of influential conservative and hegemonic forces that resist - in both subtle and overt ways - attempts at valuing and validating not only multilingualism as a normal state of being for the majority of people around the world but also the diversity of language practices and conceptualizations, what I call ignored lingualism. This article uses the concept of ignored lingualism to offer new theoretical insights that have the potential to overcome the monolingual mindset in language education policy. It adds to emerging scholarly theorizations of language that promote and value translanguaging, codemeshing, translingual practices, language as local practice, languages as creative linguistic practices, languages as plurilingual multimodal communication resources and languages as communicative resources. The article is pushing forward a more applied agenda to establish clear language education policies based on these contemporary understandings of language.

This chapter revisits and interrogates mainstream sociolinguistics and social science discourses and conversations that inform current understandings of key issues on language, migration, and diaspora. The focus is on the theoretical underpinnings and the attendant social policy and political consequences of approaches to the three interrelated areas of current concern in the field of language and society studies, namely (1) conceptualizations of the language profiles and practices of immigrant communities; (2) transnational migration and migrant identities; and (3) imaginings of diaspora cultures and identities. The chapter argues that standard ideological frameworks that came with the industrial revolution and the invention of the modern nation-state have seen debates on language, migration, and diasporas being attached to a set of unpromising associations-language as a monolithic ontological entity; diasporas as backward-looking with nostalgia for "homeland"; and immigrant communities as somewhat reified, inflexible, and never changing. Immigrant and diaspora linguistic and cultural identities have historically been looked at through the lenses of the two battalions of groupism: multiculturalism and multilingualism. These dominant theoretical frameworks that undergird current academic debates and conversations around these issues have not engaged in substantial ways the reflexive relationship among the notions of language, immigrants, and disaporas.

Australia has always been multilingual, with over 250 indigenous languages spoken at the time of White Settlement in 1788 (Clyne, 1991, p. 6). But multilingualism has sat uneasily alongside the "monolingual mindset" (Clyne, 2005) that the British colonists brought with them and it has been a point of policy dispute, linked to fears of social fragmentation, throughout the history of modern Australia. We see this uneasiness most dearly in the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 (Commonwealth of Australia, 1902), more commonly known as the White Australia Policy, which included a language proficiency instrument aimed at excluding people whose linguistic, cultural, political, and racial identities were considered undesirable. Drawing on census data, past and present trends in migration, and attitudes towards immigrant heritage languages (HLs) in Australia, this chapter looks at issues and challenges for widespread use and maintenance of HLs in immigrant communities between the mid-1900s and the present. Indigenous languages will not be a focus of the chapter. We discuss several aspects of the HL situation in Australia with an eye on implications for current and future HL education. The next section provides a brief historical overview of Australia's language-in-migration policy and early developments in HL policy. In the third section the discussion turns to demographic information drawn from the 2011 census and analyzes internal variations within and across immigrant communities as well as patterns of HL maintenance and use across generations. The key questions addressed in this section are: What can we learn about the HL situation from census data on home language(s)? What do census data hide and reveal about issues of HL diversity? The fourth section, focusing on new waves of migrants from multilingual backgrounds, follows; in this section, we look at the language profiles and language practices of African migrants to illustrate how their complex language use patterns both confirm and challenge traditional and bureaucratic approaches to documenting HLs. The last paragraph of this section draws attention to the politics of Mandarin Chinese and the enormous difficulties in equitably assessing HL learners of Mandarin in Australia. The fifth section concludes by showing linkages between the history of Australian immigration and current HL policy developments. In the concluding section we also provide some reflections on implications for a more progressive, dynamic, and versatile HL education policy for Australia and other comparable international contexts.

There are several previous studies on Vietnamese terms of address and reference. Included among them are several Vietnamese grammar books. However, most such studies consist of a collage of the various forms of address in this language, including their denotative meanings and general usage (Cooke, 1968; Thompson, 1987; Nguyễn Đình-Hòa, 1997). Others discuss the pragmatic aspects of the usage of particular terms of address, for example, the social meanings of personal pronouns (Nguyễn Phú Phong, 2002; Nguyễn Văn Thành, 2003), and kinship terms (Spencer, 1945; Benedict, 1947; Nguyễn Tài Cẩn, 1975; Luong, 1984; Lê Biên, 1999; Cao Xuân Hạo, 2003; Szymańska-Matusiewicz, 2014). Also, there are studies that illustrate the complexity of the usages of these terms to convey politeness and appraisal (Vũ Mai Yên Trần, 2011; Phuc Thien Le, 2013; Ngo & Unsworth, 2011). However, apart from those denotative and social meanings that Vietnamese terms of address convey, it is also their affective meanings, or the emotional messages transferred through switches of these terms during conversations that constitute the complexity and also the unpredictability in Vietnamese address practice. This thesis builds on and extends this previous body of literature by providing empirical evidence through systematic data collection and analysis, including conversation analysis of telenovelas, content analysis of movie subtitles, EFL students‘ translation tasks, and professional translation works. With a special focus on switches of address terms during speech events among Vietnamese speakers, this study examines the situation-regulated affective meanings of Vietnamese terms of address, which are not their intrinsic property. It argues that it is important to study how these terms are employed in different contexts for different purposes, especially for the purpose of expressing one's emotions. Multiple sources of data were used. These include a total of 147 episodes of television series, equal to approximately 110 hours, of two Vietnamese telenovelas; a review of 5 professional translation works (English to Vietnamese and Vietnamese to English); 49 translation papers performed by third-year students who majored in English (Translation and Interpretation) from the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the University of Dalat (Vietnam); a questionnaire for teachers of translation and interpretation courses that sought to better understand EFL students' translation outcomes; and face-to-face interviews with two professional translators (one in Sydney and another in Hanoi). The major findings of the study indicate that interactants' choices of address terms demonstrate their different states of attitude or emotion, which strengthens the argument that Vietnamese address terms have affective meanings, most of which are not an innate property, but can be revealed and interpreted in combination with other address terms and the situational context. The research results confirm and illustrate the general view among scholars that unlike those of many other languages, Vietnamese address terms pose major translational challenges particularly as a consequence of such factors as the relationships between the interlocutors, their relative age, and social, cultural, and emotional status. Overall, the originality and significance of this thesis lie in its innovative interdisciplinary approach that combines three branches of applied linguistics, namely pragmatics, translation studies and EFL teaching. These sub-fields of applied linguistics are usually studied in isolation of each other, thus overlooking the insights to be gained from a more integrated approach where the three are treated as complementary. The thesis innovatively uses insights from these three areas of research to contribute new empirical and theoretical ideas on how terms of address implicate emotions of speakers. The study draws on Vietnamese terms of address to illustrate the particular point about linkages between linguistic usages and the expression of emotions, and also the difficulties in solving the gaps or discrepancies between Vietnamese and a language such as English during the translation process.

'Hegemony and Language Policies in Southern Africa' uses language policy as an entry point to discuss key issues and cross-cutting themes around the evolution of discursive practices, identity narratives and vocabularies of race, culture, ethnicity and belonging. These have in recent years played a pivotal role in shaping ideas about outsiders and insiders to the southern African region. This book argues that language policy whether formal or informal, micro or macro - has always been the centrepiece of identity imaginings, struggles for political emancipation and quests for cultural affirmation and economic advancement in the colonial and postcolonial histories of southern African nations. To this end, 'Hegemony and Language Policies in Southern Africa' addresses questions on the social and political history of language policies, focusing on their significance for ethnic, immigrant and social groups, as well as for various political projects, as they have unfolded during, roughly speaking, the early twentieth century to the present. The key questions at the core of the book are as follows: What do the social and political histories of language policies tell us about current identity narratives in southern Africa? Under what circumstances are language policies deployed in the framing of identity narratives? Whose interests do language policies serve, and whose interests do they undermine in southern Africa? Are there no philosophies of language and language policy other than those inherited from the Global North? If they are indeed absent, why are we not able to develop some? Why do scholars, governments and social policy experts from the Global South always choose the easy route of adopting language ideologies and language policy frameworks originating from the Global North? In responding to these crucial questions, the book challenges the almost cultic celebration at the altar of colonial ideologies of language (that is, that language is there to be used as weapon of cultural normalization). It argues that languages do not necessarily have to exist as ontological entities in the world, and neither do they emerge from or represent a fixed real environment. This view of language exposes the tensions, contradictions and falsehoods underpinning dominant ideologies and narratives that consider languages to be standard and enumerable ontological objects.

Drawing on postcolonial theories and discourses, this paper provides another look at where the English language meets with politics, political propaganda and ZANU PF struggles for legitimacy in 21st century Zimbabwe. The paper is conceived against the well known anti-British and anti-west stance of the ZANU PF political elite, which reached its crescendo from 2000 onwards. While denouncing everything else British, President Robert Mugabe and those around him have continued to hold onto the English language (a legacy of British colonial rule in Zimbabwe) to the extent of retaining it as the country's sole official language, perfecting it and probably being more fluent in it than the native speakers. Whereas the hypocrisy of the ZANU PF anti-British and anti-west rhetoric has been analysed in the context of their appetite for western style dress codes and shopping sprees in western fashion capitals, their love for the British language has so far not been subjected to any systematic academic scrutiny. The following questions have not been addressed: Why has the English language remained insulated from the anti-British political discourse in Zimbabwe? Does this mean English has been appropriated, nativised/indigenized and therefore, no longer seen as part of the colonial legacy? What purpose does the English language serve in the anti-British and anti-west propaganda in Zimbabwe? What does the Zimbabwe case study tell us about the pragmatic and symbolic functions of English in postcolonial Africa?

The lexicographic work of the African Languages Research Institute (ALRI) has played a significant role in attempting to avoid some of the dilemmas associated with using African languages as media of instruction in the Zimbabwean education system. Monolingual Shona and Ndebele dictionaries, biomedical reference works, dictionaries of musical, literary and linguistic terms as well as children's dictionaries constitute part of ALRI's contribution towards the goal of mainstreaming African languages in the education system. This article is an evaluation of the research activities taking place at ALRI. The aim of the article is to demonstrate that if they receive adequate attention through corpus planning, African languages possess the capacity to play an important role as media of instruction across the entire spectrum of the education curricula in Zimbabwe and elsewhere. The article concludes by observing that, if the efforts of ALRI are to succeed, there is need for the co-operation of all stakeholders in language practice.