ABSTRACT
Research method, known as multi-site ethnography, showed how student's language was received at school, versus how young people's words were interpreted and used in other educational sites. Research has found that South African schools reproduce inequalities more consistently than Morocco, Russia and the United States. Studying learning amongst youth at Rosemary Gardens High School (RGHS), Youth Amplified and the Doodvenootskap (DVS) demonstrated the central role that language ideologies played in the ranking of student's abilities. The young hip hop crew called the DVS positioned themselves within an alternative international and local linguistic economy. In the late 1980s and 1990s Cape Town based groups like Prophets of da City and Black Noise used conscious hip hop to create Black Nationalist narratives on their own terms. These crews used linguistic codes that connected with the daily experiences of young South Africans classified as coloured and black by the apartheid state.
