ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly reviews some dominant research traditions in the use of English in Africa, questioning some of their assumptions about languages, and then focuses on a new emerging analytical framework based on the concept of ‘vague linguistique’ (Thomas 2007). ‘Vague linguistique’ differs from traditional structuralist approaches to language research in Africa, which tend to focus on the linguistic system, even if the researcher acknowledges the social context of their data. In contrast, ‘vague linguistique’ is a plurilanguaging approach whose goal is to capture the dynamic and evolving relationships between English, other indigenous African languages and multiple open semiotic systems, from the point of view of the language users themselves; i.e. an insider or emic perspective. We apply this approach to a discussion of multimodal data from taxi culture in Ghana in the mid-twentieth century and South Africa in the early twenty-first century.
