Overview

""Remixing multilingualism"" is conceptualised in this book as engaging in the linguistic act of using, combining and manipulating multilingual forms. It is about creating new ways of 'doing' multilingualism through cultural acts and identities and involving a process that invokes bricolage. This book is an ethnographic study of multilingual remixing achieved by highly multilingual participants in the local hip hop culture of Cape Town. In globalised societies today previously marginalized speakers are carving out new and innovating spaces to put on display their voices and identities through the creative use of multilingualism. This book contributes to the development of new conceptual insights and theoretical developments on multilingualism in the global South by applying the notions of stylization, performance, performativity, entextualisation and enregisterment. This takes place through interviews, performance analysis and interactional analysis, showing how young multilingual speakers stage different personae, styles, registers and language varieties.

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9781472591111

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Reviews

I am impressed by the author's nearly encyclopaedic, but no less critical knowledge of current literature in sociolinguistics and cognate fields ; the author's ability to summarize difficult theories and present them in a lucid way ; his contribution to a re-theorization of the notion of language so as to capture its inherent messiness and fuzziness ; the choice of ethnography as a research methodology; and the painstakingly detailed analyses of texts . It constitutes an important contribution to the field of sociolinguistics, and I would welcome it as a book in the series Advances in Sociolinguistics. -- Tommaso Milani, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa ...the author shows a good command of academic discourse, presents well conducted ethnographic research...and provides insightful theorizations of the collected data, linking the findings to current debates about multilingualism, the nature of language and the possibilities for identity work and agency. -- Professor Lionel Wee, National University Of Singapore, Singapore Hip-Hop messes up with language, it takes it to a whole nother level, where the poetic is mixed with the political, where the global and the local meet in a space of metissage, and where the familiar is so worked-on that it becomes unfamiliar. Grounded in the multilingual, the ethnographic and the marginalized, Remix Multilingualism shows us the power of (Global) Hip-Hop (Language) and why we need to have our ears to the ground and hear it. WORD! Awad Ibrahim, Full Professor of Education, University of Ottawa, Canada Remix Multilingualism is the book we've been waiting for ever since 1994 when the 'new' South Africa enshrined its eleven official languages policy in the Constitution. William's clear, scholarly vision and rigorous, ethnographic labor in the Hip Hop vineyards of Kuilsriver have yielded a master text which demonstrates the rich multilingualism of marginalized voices in South Africa (and by extension, elsewhere in the Global South). It is a major contribution to the fields of Hip Hop studies and Multilingualism and a must-read for scholars and teachers alike. Geneva Smitherman, University Distinguished Professor Emerita, Michigan State University, USA

I am impressed by the author's nearly encyclopaedic, but no less critical knowledge of current literature in sociolinguistics and cognate fields ; the author's ability to summarize difficult theories and present them in a lucid way ; his contribution to a re-theorization of the notion of language so as to capture its inherent messiness and fuzziness ; the choice of ethnography as a research methodology; and the painstakingly detailed analyses of texts . It constitutes an important contribution to the field of sociolinguistics, and I would welcome it as a book in the series Advances in Sociolinguistics. -- Tommaso Milani, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa ...the author shows a good command of academic discourse, presents well conducted ethnographic research...and provides insightful theorizations of the collected data, linking the findings to current debates about multilingualism, the nature of language and the possibilities for identity work and agency. -- Professor Lionel Wee, National University Of Singapore, Singapore

Author Information

Quentin Williams is a Senior Lecturer in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and also a Research Fellow in the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) at the same university.

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