Resumen de Translanguaging practices in complex multilingual spaces: a discontinuous continuity in post-independent South Africa
Whereas the use of discursive linguistic resources among multilingual speakers has been closely scrutinized in recent years, highly complex multilingual spaces have not been adequately documented in research. This article reports on new sociolinguistic developments in post-Apartheid South Africa and explores how people mobility and integration of a historically divided society produces hybrid ways of identifying and making sense of the world. Analysis of self-recorded student interactions from five townships in Johannesburg shows that traditional language boundaries have blurred and given way to a complex and multilayered variety, referred to as kasi-taal. The results also show that there is a high degree of mutual inter-comprehensibility that cuts across Sotho and Nguni language clusters. Using notions of sociolinguistics of mobility and translanguaging, I draw insights on these language developments to predict future directions of language use in a manner consistent with the “discontinuous continuity” processes that characterize the twenty-first century. Recommendations for further research are considered for super-diverse contexts at the end of the article.
