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Global migratory patterns bring about significant changes in the linguistic and cultural ecologies at the local level in both the North and the South. These changes have coincided, for example, with attempts to fashion a European Union via complex legal and administrative instruments in the North. However, political change and conflict result in dislocation and mobility at individual and large-scale community levels. These become apparent through tension exhibited in social networks and structures which are at once centripetal and centrifugal (e.g. Lo Bianco 2010). Change is thus a function of ever evolving diversity as well as of new configurations of structures of restraint (e.g. Foucault 1977; Bourdieu 1991). Debates within Europe, including “super-diversity” (Vertovec 2007), may offer a lens on discourses accompanying change in Australia, located in the geographic South, but with ambivalent aspirations towards the North. Migration from Africa, the Middle East/Afghanistan and Asia brings tangible, unequal movements in the local ecological landscape. As elsewhere, increasing diversification expels urbanized anxiety while civil and public layered responses exert pressure towards both divergence and convergence. Changing identities and “linguistic citizenship” (Stroud 2001) emerge in local narratives of attempts to widen or close spatial divides, and in seams of language shift, maintenance and sustainability.

Multilingual education policy has been a controversial affair in South Africa, especially over the last 60 years. Recent research conducted by government-led and independent agencies shows declining student achievement within an education system that employs 11 home languages for education in the first three grades of primary school, followed by a transition to English medium for the majority (approximately 80%) of speakers of African languages. Research that focuses on the linguistic practices of students in urban settings suggests that there is a disjuncture between the construction of multilingualism within contemporary education policy and the multilingual reality of students (e.g., Heugh, 2003; Makoni, 2003; Makoni & Pennycook, 2012; Plüddemann, 2013; Probyn, 2009; Stroud & Heugh, 2011). There is also a disjunction between constitutional and other government policies that advance, on paper, a multilingual policy, yet are implemented through an assimilatory drive towards English (Alexander & Heugh, 1999). As predicted nearly two decades ago, the ideological framing of multilingualism during the negotiations in the early 1990s was to have consequences for the way in which language policy would unfold in the education sector over the next 20 to 30 years (Heugh, 1995, 1999). While poor student achievement in school may be ascribed to a range of socioeconomic indicators, this article draws attention to contributory factors that relate to language(s) in education. These include different constructions of multilingualism in education in relation to sociolinguistic and educational linguistic considerations, contradictory interpretations of multilingual education in a series of education policy documents, pedagogical weaknesses, and recent attempts to strengthen the provision of African languages education alongside English in the first 10 years of school (Grades R and 0–9; e.g., Department of Basic Education (DBE), 2013a, 2013b).

Approximately 2,100 (30% of the world's) languages are spoken in Africa (Lewis, 2009), with multilingualism a defining characteristic of the continent. Keywords: bilingualism; Eastern Africa; language policy; Southern Africa; Western Africa; multilingualism

The study of code-switching has been one of the most dynamic areas in linguistics over the last three decades, at least since Poplack's influential paper on Puerto Rican Spanish-English bilingual speech in New York. The demarcation line between code-switching and bilingual interference is definitional: in the case of interference the interaction of the two languages is structural rather than involving phonetic material: words or morphemes from the two languages. This chapter presents some of the issues raised in the vast literature on code-mixing in three main sections: sociolinguistics, grammar, and language use. Code-switching capacities develop and change across the life span of an individual. The major methodological problem in the pragmatic tradition is that the interpretation of conversations in which codes are switched remains subjective. Labovian tradition of accountable analysis of naturalistic speech data is stressed in the work of Poplack and associates as in the work of MacSwan.

Language policy and planning tension, between concerns for ethnolinguistic self-determination and the accommodation of plurality on the one hand and participation in global discourses on the other hand, characterises the last two decades of debate in Ethiopia. The discussion in this paper draws attention to linguistically diverse language planning processes in Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries of the world. In particular it will demonstrate that clear policy and guidelines from above, when unfettered by an over-emphasis of Western models, and coupled with decentralised implementation, allows some degree of localised language planning, or language planning from below (cf. Liddicoat & Baldauf, 2008; Hogan-Brun, 2010). Such practice may result in surprisingly swift and diverse regional responses which accommodate linguistic pluralism over a ten to fifteen year timeframe (early 1990s to 2004/5). Decentralisation of educational authority to eleven Regional Education Bureaus in Ethiopia has served to encourage capacity building and increase local and regional participation in educational and language planning and development activities. However, in the absence of clearly formulated implementation plans at federal level, a change in political leadership with a turn towards ‘international’ advisors and educational models, demonstrates the vulnerability of regional and locally implemented policy. In the Ethiopian case, the goal of linguistic diversity has become obscured by the allure of English and there has been a ‘washback effect’ of this through the system, effectively reversing earlier progressive achievements in the expansion of multilingual education throughout the country. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article identifies language education policies in Africa and their relationship to development and post-colonial issues. Major language commissions, declarations, reports, and policies concur that the use of indigenous languages in school, alongside a language of wider communication, facilitates education. Yet, with few exceptions, in African schools, indigenous languages are ignored or removed rapidly from classroom learning. Mother-tongue language policies are seldom implemented. Instead, the colonial habitus continues. Policies see-saw between greater and lesser tolerance of African languages, depending on the political party in power.

International audience

KATHLEEN HEUGH questions why the Department of Education has not insisted on the implementation of a new language in education policy. She writes that despite the investment in education in South Africa, we are not contributing towards the validation of African languages through the education system

Bibliography: pages 305-319., Colonisation has left Africa with a collection of multilingual states· whose physical lines of demarcation bear little relation to linguistic or cultural boundaries. Furthermore, the colonial period has left behind it a legacy of the colonial languages. As these states gained independence, the new political hierarchy has defined its language policy in accordance with its political ideology. This dissertation has been set out to examine the effects of the political ideology behind language medium choice during the British colonial rule in selected African states, on that which followed after independence. Secondly, there has been an attempt· to investigate possible connective links in the language policies of independent states on those of states which gain later independence. This has been undertaken with the aim of building up a set of criteria which might make it feasible to make certain predictions for the likely course of language policy in a future Namibia and South Africa. The question of instruction through the medium of the mother tongue as opposed to the arguments in favour of instruction through the medium of a language of wider communication (English in most cases here) is addressed. The role and nature of nationalism as the most significant political ideology of post-colonial African states i.s explored in as far as it determines language choice.