Multilingualism and transformation in South African higher education language policy framework: A Bacchian analysis

Abstract

Globally, there is a recurring discourse that higher education systems need to transform. In South Africa, this discourse is articulated in the post-apartheid agenda of redress and equity. Before 1994, higher education was racially and linguistically segregated. Although the political change occurred, the linguistic injustice remains ingrained. Much of the transformation narrative has therefore been rhetorical, a pattern that forms the perspective against which more recent policy interventions must be read. This article analyses the 2020 Language Policy Framework for Public Higher Education Institutions using Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ (WPR) approach. The analysis examines how multilingualism is problematised in policy discourse and how these problem representations may enable or constrain transformative intent at the level of policy framing. The analysis shows that multilingualism is largely represented as a reparative indication of inclusivity, framed in a policy rationality focused on coordination, planning and conformity. While such a framing may enable administrative accommodation of linguistic diversity, the analysis suggests that it is unlikely, on its own, to generate deeper onto-epistemic decentring, understood here as shifts in what qualifies as acceptable knowledge, how knowledge is produced, and which languages are recognised as vehicles of theory and research. Contribution: This article offers a critical application of Bacchi’s WPR framework to the higher education language policy framework. Through the WPR analysis, the article argues that multilingualism can function as a transformative praxis when institutions orient themselves towards knowledge production that is not only accessed through, but also conceptualised and theorised in, African languages. This argument is framed as a call for epistemic plurality, that is, the recognition of multiple linguistic and epistemic resources as constitutive of knowledge production.