ABSTRACT
This chapter engages debates about translanguaging and superdiversity, arguing that the phenomena denoted by the new concepts share a common ontological status with monoglot standard languages. Our argument focuses on racialization and language, analyzing race, class, and language in the United States and South Africa, then sketching the historical development of standard and vernacular language registers in South Africa. Within this social-historical and language-ideological context, we investigate dynamics of fixity and fluidity in language use in contemporary South African schools. We present two case studies of schools serving plurilingual communities in the Cape Town region: one an English-medium primary school, the other a Xhosa-medium township school that transitions to English-medium in the fourth grade. Examining language policies, classroom interaction, and participant commentary, we study tensions between standardizing and vernacularizing impulses in both settings. Analyzing register-stabilizing as well as register-challenging processes, and how speakers are recruited to registers of Xhosa, Afrikaans, and English, we find similar school policies but different classroom practices. A perduring tension between standard and vernacular registers, centered on ‘mixed languages’, dialectically binds the fixed and fluid, the standardized and superdiverse.
