Purpose:

This project and paper examine the intersection between language, culture and identity, exploring the phenomenology of how ideas on language use, fluidity and supremacy effect the formation of culture, and identity for South African scholar Lebogang Mokwena. The project and paper explore how culture and identity inform Lebogang’s understanding of language. Through the use of documentary narrative and theoretical analysis, both aspects of the project discuss issues of language context, supremacy and language fluidity as an integral part of identity formation for minoritized people and as central to thier formation of cultural and social capital.

Methods:

I have chosen to use both case study and narrative as my methodologies for this project and paper. Both of these methodologies lend a sense of validity, and authenticity to the examination of the intersection between language, culture and identy and underscore the phenomenological nature of those relationships.

The Project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHV7q2V77K4

Although I am calling this a case study, the research method that is being used most effectively here is that of narrative. It is through narrative that I believe we more accurately understand Lebogang Mokwena’s experiences around language, cultue and identity. Donald Blumenfeld-Jones discusses the use and usefulness of narrative as a qualitative research tool, citing its ability to both lend authenticity and believability to studys. He points out the heraneutic ability of narrative storytelling in social science to cross the gap between social science and art-making. Madelyn Grumet (1988) states that “Fidelity rather that truth is the measure of these tales.”  Fidelity in this sense deals with meaning that the teller of the tale derives from any experience that is told, or the teller’s truth. This interview takes into consideration this critical approach

The video is part of a multi-modal examination of the intersections of language, culture and identity analyzing a 40 minute documentary interview with South African polyglot and doctoral student of sociology, Lebogang Mokwena.  In a 39 minute video interview, Lebogang discusses the formation of her identity as a South African woman. Charting her development as a student, citizen of the world, academic scholar, and as a professional Lebogang examines her aquisition of, connection to, and use of different languages in different settings which situates language as a phenomenological experience that both is an element of the creation of self as well as an expander of cultures and societies. It is both Lebogang and my assertion that these ‘selves’ are tied inextricably to her socio-linguistic experiences. Some of her ‘selves’ are performative, others are more ‘authentic’, but all of them belong to her.

The Paper:

This Paper examines the frameworks of several theorists from the fields of educational research, languge, culture and identity and focuses them through the lens of personal narrative. Mikhail Bakhtin poses the question of whether language “really exists for the speakers subjective conciousness as an objective system of incontestable forms?”(39) in his discussions on the locus and formation of identity. I tie this to my discussion with Lebo  in regard to her experiences of learning and using language in a country whose modern foundations (socially, politically, economically) are embdded with.

 In discussing language in connection to identity and culture, I resist the urge to examine language in a siloed manner. Here I bind language to cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabba who states in regard to theories on culture, 

“When I talk of negotiation rather than negation, it is to convey a temporality that makes it possible to conceive of the articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements: a dialectic without the emergence of a teleological or transcendent History, and beyond the prescriptive forin of symptomatic reading where the nervous tics on the surface of ideology reveal the ‘real materialist contradiction’ that History embodies. In such a discursive temporality, the event of theory becomes the negotiation of contradictory and antagonistic instances that open up hybrid sites and objectives of struggle, and destroy those negative polarities between knowledge and its objects, and between theory and practical-political reason?”(19)

It is in this same context that theorists often think about and discuss language. The  distinctions between language ‘negotiation’ and language ‘negation’ are often missed when dealing with supramacist notions that favor the acquisition and usage of status elevated languages over indigenous languages or in the use of  languages firmly grounded in orality. In a pedagogical sense, the domination of major European languages as well as a focus on ‘graphia’ or written language in western school systems mirror and reify the antagonism discussed by Bhabba effectively conflating discourse on the the link between language and formation of the self. Bordieu in discussion of the use of language as social and cultural capital. 

Socio-linguist Rusty Barrett speaks about the use of language to solidify racial identity and as forms of resistance. This notion aligns with Lebogangs’ discussion of the use of Afrikaans first as a lingua franca uniting South Africans in a common identity, and later in the indigenous South Africans’ refusal to use it as a means of asserting tribal affiliations and identities.

Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner  in their article “Translingual Literacy, Language  Difference, and Matters of Agency”  also extend the conversation by discussing notions of language deficits and the denigrations of the languages of subordinated groups. Lu and Horner state that

“Insofar as the ideology of monoligualism associates language difference strictly with subordinated groups, the labor necessary to the language practices of members of those groups marked by dominant ideology as different is taken not as normal but, rather, as evidence of the need to quarrantine them from the mainstream…” (3)

This further cementing the idea that there are hiearchies of language, that the dominant group may assign value to both the languages of minoritized people as well as to those that speak those languages, devaluing both as currency in specific spaces.   

Case Study:

Lebogang Mwokwena is a 35 year old scholar who hails from Johannesburg South Africa and is the speaker of 10 languages. In her early years she was raised in the township of Soweto until she was chosen to attend a prestigious German private school. At minute 18:48 of her interview, Lebo speaks of her experiences of the tension between her tribal “mother tongue” of Setswana which her father spoke fluently and Afrikaans, which, although it remains a politically problematic language for indigenous South Africans from the 1970’s on, charting in a condensed fashion how Afrikaans moved from a language of social intercourse and became “a language of setting limits… a language to restrict”  It is the language her mother and many  indigenous South Africans of her generation speak exclusively. Lebogang and I spoke of the adaptive nature of Afrikaans, both from its Dutch roots, to the possible melding with Indigenous languages. Although she cannot recognize any specific roots or words that relate the two, then by virtue of grammatical structure or pronunciation surely it has adapted.  I would posit that this is the way of all language/socio-cultural interactions over time. Lebogang also disclosed her frustrations of having to translanguage between Afrikaans and Setswana and not fully feeling as fluent as she would like to be in her mother tongue.

Lebogang discusses the trama of being forced to learn German for school and the value and prestige placed on  being chosen to learn and speak that language for schooling at minute 12:41. It is also this  pressure to acquire German and then English for academic capital that make her an intellectual adventurer and has allowed her to perform as an academic. This phenomenon points to the dual nature of language substitution and interruption by dominant language cultures. She is clear that these language acquisitions were phenomenological in nature, helping to form her identity and bringing to her development a depth and richness. Although language has been fundamental to this formation, it has also loaded and problematic. Lebogang’s interactions, social, academic and professional are experienced here through the lens of language and culture as she examines her formation of self or selves. She discusses also the many selves that are inhabited by language, each language helping to access different parts of her self or perhaps even different selves. Lebogang also speaks of the social congress of language, pointing out that translanguaging was organic in both the Soweto township and Johannesburg. She speaks of the respect and courtesy of knowing at least a little of your friend’s mother tongue and addressing their parents and grandparents in their mother tongue as a sign of respect. It is also noteworthy that language supremacy is not just an issue of color but is connected to the power of the majority. In Johannesburg she speaks of the supremacy of the Zulu language and why by virtue of the number of Zulus living in Johannesburg, it is the dominant language of the indigenous Africans there.

Lastly, Lebogang personifies language as though it were a living entity, describing language (Setswana) as always ready to make an appearance when English comes up short for her(min29:08)  She speak animatedly, using facial expressions and hand gestures to puntuate her statements, pointing to the language beyond words and conveying the sentiments through which she experiences language. She is saddened by the inability to chart both her history in Setswana and to access a more pure, concrete and authentic South African identity because of the orality of her language. Lebogang feels that the emphasis on written language  renders her language less powerful. In her opinion, there is no untainted  way to examine her culture as the tools through which her culture is examined are tainted by the  history of conquest and colonization. This issue renders all Africans on the continent inferior when compared in converstion with the culture of the west.

Ultimately she believes that language, culture and identity are inextricably linked, each building on and contributing to the other. Both power and supremacy in language play key roles in how we see ourselves through language and key to the formation of identity within our cultures.

Question prompts for Lebogang Mokwena interview:

 In your own words, characterize the intersection between language culture and identity

How many languages do you speak?

What is your mother tongue?

Speak about Setswana? (are you fluent? do you write it?) 

What language do you consider most you?

How many selves do you have?

Speak about language fluency, fluidity and translanguaging. 

Intersection/interaction in language. 

Speak about Johannesburg and Soweto township

Which languages had/have the most currency?

Speak about language supremacy.

What languages do you struggle to make meaning in?

Speak about German, Afrikaans and English vs. Idigenous languages. 

Words that find their way into Afrikaans?

What about English? The language of her relationship.

Is there language supremacy among tribes.

References

• Bakhtin, M. M., Morris, P., Voloshinov, V. N., & Medvedev, P. N.(1994) The Bakhtin reader: Selected writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, and Voloshinov. London: E. Arnold. 
• Barrett, Rusty,(2006) “Language Ideology and Racial Inequality: Competing Functions of Spanish in an Anglo-owned Mexican Restaurant”  Linguistics Faculty Publications. Paper 10
• Bhabba, K. H.(1994) The Location of Culture, London, N.Y. Routledge
• Grumet, M. (1988). Bitter milk: women and teaching. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
• Hatch, J. Amos, Wisniewski, Richard (1995) Life, History and Narrative, Bristol, PA, The Falmer Press, Taylor & Francis 
• Lu,M., Horner, B (2012) Translingual Literacy and Matters of Agency, University of Louisville