This article presents a systematic review of research on language and multilingualism in mathematics education published in the South African journal Pythagoras from 1994 to 2021. This time frame was chosen as the year 1994 marked the acknowledgement of 11 official languages in the new democratic South Africa (including 9 indigenous languages), compared to only Afrikaans and English during the apartheid era. The review considers emergent themes in the included articles and examines what the articles reveal about mathematics education in South Africa. In addition to other findings, our corpus of literature indicates that research in this field of mathematics has been mostly undertaken in under-resourced schools and that research under the theme of multilingual education is at the forefront of research in South African mathematics education, while research on language policy needs more attention. Research on multilingual education in our corpus of literature also reveals great awareness of the value of seeing language as a resource, as well as the benefits that accrue when learners’ home languages are taken into account in mathematics teaching and learning. The gaps in research in the field of language and multilingualism in the teaching and learning of mathematics are also noted and recommendations for future research are made.
Translation, considered as a product of linguistic diversity or the confusion following the fall of the Tower of Babel, represents an act of communication. In a multilingual society, such as Burkina Faso, translation is an indispensable tool for socioeconomic, political and cultural development. In this paper I propose to examine how multilingualism, which is at the origin of translation, is reflected in Burkinabè literature. Since literature is a fictional representation of reality, I shall examine the way literary communication mirrors this reality, i.e., the linguistic and cultural diversity of Burkina Faso. In addition, this paper goes beyond the classical and linguistic definitions of translation in terms of equivalence between target text and source text and claims that, to some extent, African writers qualify as translators. This is examplified by Fidèle P. Rouamba‘s novel Le Carnaval de la mort (“The carnival of death”, 1995).
This essay investigates the relationship between memory, or rather amnesia, in the South African context and soap opera. South Africa has only recently celebrated ten years of democracy and the past still affects the lives of its inhabitants. The country has undergone far-reaching shifts in its political, economic and cultural paradigms. These also manifest in the production of meaning in popular visual culture, and more particularly, in soap opera. South Africans remember in different ways - processes that are reflected in the narratives of local soap opera. The genre is popular and its viewers invariably identify with the extended story plots. Amnesia often comprises a large part of soap opera narrative. This essay suggests that archetypes and myths of amnesia may shed some light on these recurring themes of memory and amnesia. Initially, archetypes and myths pertaining to memory and amnesia are discussed, followed by the exploration of its manifestation in local soap opera.
Tuan Guru – the first official imam at the Cape – used Malayu as the medium of instruction in the Dorp Street madrasah (Muslim religious school) which he established at the end of the 18th century. This changed in the middle of the 19th century when Cape Dutch was adopted as the language of instruction. While the children were familiar with this language they could not read the Latin script since they were barred from attending the public schools. Cape Muslims could, however, read the Arabic script which they had to learn for liturgical purposes - though they could not speak Arabic. To overcome this conundrum, numerous scholars and teachers began to translate Arabic texts into Cape Dutch and then transcribing these in the Latin script. These “readers” came to serve as official textbooks in the madrasahs at the Cape. This article traces the development of this genre of literature which came to be known as Arabic-Afrikaans, comments on manuscripts that were identified by Adrianus van Selms, Achmat Davids and Hans Kähler and highlights the daunting challenge of transcribing Afrikaans phonetically in the Arabic script.
Wannie Carstens: An agent for reconciliation. His only dream was to reconcile the Afrikaans community. When I first met Wannie Carstens, I thought to myself: This must be one of those WOW moments that people talk about. Two individuals from different backgrounds came together, thanks to Afrikaans, and we clicked immediately. Since then, our friendship for the last 12 years has sustained a number of storms. But mostly our friendship bore fruit that would change the Afrikaans landscape irreversibly, whilst at the same time our friendship continues to grow. In this contribution I will firstly describe that WOW moment, after which I will elaborate on three aspects that glued our relationship together. First there was the establishment of the Afrikaanse Taalraad (ATR) (Afrikaans Language Council) which had started in 2003 already, became a reality in 2008 and lasted until 2013. It was in this time that we travelled to the Netherlands for the first time. Our relationship continued when we both served on the Board of the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns (SA Academy for Science and Arts). This journey, which was not always smooth for Wannie, lasted from 2012 till 2014. After Wannie completed his term as chairman of the Academy and my term as chair of the ATR came to an end, we again found a new common goal: that of a book called Ons kom van vêr (We came from afar). This will be the third aspect that I will be writing about in this contribution. Throughout this piece I will point out how Wannie has always strived towards reconciliation and how this theme runs through his life as a whole.
The phonotactic system of Afrikaans underwent multiple changes in its diachronic development. While some consonant clusters got lost, others still surface in contemporary Afrikaans. In this paper, we investigate to what extent articulatory difference between the segments of a cluster contribute to its successful transmission. We proceed in two steps. First, we analyse the respective effects of differences in manner of articulation, place of articulation and voicing on the age at which a cluster is acquired by analysing Dutch acquisition data. Second, we investigate the role that these articulatory differences play in the diachronic frequency development from Dutch to Afrikaans. We demonstrate that large differences in manner of articulation between segments contribute to a cluster’s success in acquisition and diachrony. In contrast, large differences in place of articulation have impeding effects, while voicing difference shows a more complicated behaviour.
Philology. Linguistics, African languages and literature
The creation of reality image in a novel. This article discusses aspects of the process of creative writing and specifically endeavours to give a heuristic view on the creation of image of reality, or Zeitgeist, as a spatial element in a novel. Therefore it discusses space as a specific aspect of creative writing. The core of this article is, in other words, a summarised study of the realisation of the various aspects of Zeitgeist in a novel or other genres of fiction as, for instance, short stories or novellas. The conclusion is that Zeitgeist, or the spirit of the times, can indeed be realised in a novel. Apart from a discussion on the application of the narrative elements, attention is also paid to the various aspects of Zeitgeist, or a particular image of reality. The aim is to emphasise and accentuate that Zeitgeist, or image of reality is, in fact, an inseparable part of space and the spatial dynamics in a novel. By taking a closer look at the different facets of Zeitgeist – for instance identity, cultural space, the socio-economy, as well as politics – it is stressed that an image of reality can be created in a novel by bringing into play creative elements like character, space, time and plot. This is done in order to unveil the above mentioned facets. All these aspects or facets not only have a deep-seated influence on Zeitgeist, but occur at the very core of it.
Fiela’s child and Sorg are two female-authored popular Afrikaans novels that entertain as subtext dynamics of female agency in the same region and historical period, namely the Little Karoo of the late 19th century. The two novels present a pertinent counter-discursive paradigm to the more mainstream master narrative representations of women of the time. The novels were written and published during the late-apartheid and early post-apartheid years, 1985 and 2006, respectively, and as a result of these dynamics of production, they also engage with the socio-politics of this time, maybe even more so than with the British imperial colonialist period in which the novels are set. As such, both novels step into the discursive streams that flow in and around the trauma work that is associated with South Africa’s contemporary engagement with its colonial and apartheid legacies and heritage. Both texts also contribute to the creation and popularisation of new national master narratives. It is then in this context that these texts can be seen as participating in the multivocal discursive project of new identity construction, specifically identity construction through the writing of a new heterogeneous national autobiography.
The views of forty veterans on sixty years of African agricultural development, published recently in book form, are analyzed against the background of René Dumont’s epochal publication “L’Afrique noire est mal partie.” Although some of Dumont’s opinions and recommendations are no longer valid, it is striking how many of them are as relevant today as they were fifty years ago. This paper reviews the recent history of agricultural development comparing Dumont’s visions and those of the veterans from a number of angles, viz. the all-important issue of the strengths and weaknesses of subsistence and family farming, the development pathways of the forest and savannah zones, and the disappointing adoption record of new technology during the past fifty years. Next, future prospects are reviewed, as well as the conditions for significant progress, in respect of land ownership, farmer organization, education in the widest sense, “chain development” and, perhaps most importantly, dedication, honesty and discipline at all levels. Finally, the often unfavorable role of international aid is reviewed and recent developments are highlighted, in particular the dangerous trend of massive land acquisition by “outside” parties.
History of Africa, African languages and literature
Van Staden, Annalene , Badenhorst, Gerhard , Ridge, Elaine
This article argues the importance of allowing deaf children to acquire sign language from an early age. It demonstrates firstly that the critical/sensitive period hypothesis for language acquisition can be applied to specific language aspects of spoken language as well as sign languages (i.e. phonology, grammatical processing and syntax). This makes early diagnosis and early intervention of crucial importance. Moreover, research findings presented in this article demonstrate the advantage that sign language offers in the early years of a deaf child’s life by comparing the language development milestones of deaf learners exposed to sign language from birth to those of late-signers, orally trained deaf learners and hearing learners exposed to spoken language. The controversy over the best medium of instruction for deaf learners is briefly discussed, with emphasis placed on the possible value of bilingual-bicultural programmes to facilitate the development of deaf learners’ literacy skills. Finally, this paper concludes with a discussion of the implications/recommendations of sign language teaching and Deaf education in South Africa.
Language and Literature, African languages and literature
The use of two or more languages in conversation is very common in immigration contexts. When immigrants learn a second language (L2) in their host cultures, the acquisition of the L2 often influences their native languages (L1s). This influence often manifests as language attrition, the non-pathological loss of the native language due to emigration and the related lack of exposure to the mother tongue (Köpke and Schmid 2004:5). Native language retrieval problems can then arise on lexical or structural levels since the L2 lexicon and structure are more readily available to the immigrant speaker. In addition to L1 attrition, L2 language items often get inserted into the L1 speech for socially motivated reasons. Code-switching in immigration contexts is the simultaneous use of, for example, L1 and L2 in discourse, where cultural and social meaning is often attached to the language choice immigrants make (Schely-Newman 1998:97; Scheu 2000:133). The differentiation and combined investigation of code-switching, which is socially motivated, and language attrition, which is predominantly a psycholinguistic issue, is a new and important approach to the analysis of bilingual data. In research so far the one area has hardly taken note of the other (Walters 2005). This article attempts to close the gap identified here as it investigates, in a connected way, functional aspects of code-switching and identifies selected socio-demographic factors that affect immigrants' lexical attrition. It reports on a study that applies a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods on a corpus of multilingual interviews with thirty people who had immigrated to Germany from the United States between 1964 and 2001. This paper discusses the overall distribution of occurrences of code-switching and lexical attrition across the corpus and sheds light on how code-switching and lexical attrition correlate with identity-related factors such as English language-related professions, social contact with other Americans and the length of residence in Germany (quantitative approach). On the other hand, it shows how intercultural identities are constructed through the employment of code-switching (qualitative approach).
Philology. Linguistics, African languages and literature