Hegemony and Language Policies in Southern Africa: Identity, Integration, Development

Abstract

'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.