Language portraits, supplemented by a questionnaire and interview, were used to elicit data on the language biographies and linguistic repertoires of students at a tertiary institution in Johannesburg. The paper reports on insights regarding the effects of mobility, language attitudes, multilingual identities, and on contradictions between heteroglossia and a monolingual habitus.
This paper relates to reflections on urban multilingualism as a common phenomenon worldwide, and as the norm in Africa. The complexity of multilingualism has become so salient in sociolinguistic studies, that increased attention has turned to how speakers experience and manage language diversity in virtually all social spaces. Specifically, the paper relates to Brigitta Busch’s work on language biography and linguistic repertoire, using language portraits as to elicit the narrative input of youngsters studying at an urban tertiary education institution. The respondents in the study were 25 young adults at a university in Johannesburg, South Africa’s multilingual economic centre. Their multilingual profiles are drawn from a triangulation of three kinds of data (questionnaire, body portrait, recorded interview) to reflect pertinent aspects of the dynamics of this group’s multilingual language development, language awareness and language use. Their own voices on communicative resources used in different spaces within and beyond the university will be given to articulate the convergence of several languages and linguistic practices in a multilingual environment that is in some ways unique and in other ways global. Attention goes to the effects of respondents’ mobility – their own and that of their families – on which languages are most pertinent in different social spaces, the participants’ attitudes to the different languages that make up their repertoires, and the ways in which linguistic identities become kaleidoscopic as youngsters accept English dominance in education and future workplaces, while still retaining closeness to nurturing home languages, family languages and community languages. In the analysis, concepts such as ‘multilingualism’, ‘plurilingualism’, ‘heteroglossia’, and ‘linguistic diversity’ as they are used in recent literature on multilingual repertoires, will be revisited. Finally, the paper will comment on an apparent contradiction between lived experiences of heteroglossia while respondents still espouse popular perspectives that hold to monolingual norms.
