South Africa is a highly mobile country characterized by historical displacements and contemporary mobilities, both social and demographic. Getting to grips with diversity, dislocation, relocation and anomie, as well as pursuing aspirations of mobility, is part of people's daily experience that often takes place on the margins of conventional politics. A politics of conviviality is one such form of politics of the popular that emerges in contexts of rapid change, diversity, mobility, and the negotiation and mediation of complex affiliations and attachments. The questions in focus for this paper thus pertain to how forms of talk, born out of displacement, anomie and contact in the superdiverse contexts of South Africa, allow for the articulation of life-styles and aspirations that break with the historical faultlines of social and racial oppression. We first expand upon the idea of (marginal) linguistic practices as powerful mediations of political voice and agency, an idea that can be captured in the notion of linguistic citizenship, the rhetorical foundation of a politics of conviviality. We then move on to analyze the workings of linguistic citizenship in the multilingual practices of two distinct manifestations of popular culture, namely hip hop and a performance by a stand-up comedian in Mzoli's meat market in Gugulethu, Cape Town. The paper concludes with a general discussion on the implications for politics of multilingualism and language policy.

The study of hip-hop in Cape Town, and indeed South Africa, has traditionally focused on the narratives and poetics of resistance, race and counter-hegemonic agency in the context of apartheid and the early days of post-apartheid. Despite this attention, hip-hop cipha performances remain relatively under-researched. The aim of this paper is to suggest that cipha performances display linguistic and discursive features that not only are of particular interest to rap music and hip-hop on the Cape Flats of Cape Town speci cally, but that also engage core issues around multilingualism, agency and voice more generally. It demonstrates how in the process of entextualization a sense of locality, extreme locality, emerges in cipha performances by means of verbal cueing, representing place, expressing disrespect (dissing), and the (deictic) reference to local coordinates that is achieved by transposing or recontextualizing transidiomatic phrases, and by incorporating local proxemics and audience reactions through commentary and response. It concludes by suggesting that competition around acceptable linguistic forms and framings (metalinguistic disputes) of extreme locality comprise the very micro-processes behind the formation of new registers. At the same time, these registers create the semiotic space for the exercise of agency and voice through multilingual practices, that is, multilingual citizenship. Key words: multilingualism, hip-hop, rap, extreme locality, multilingual citizenship, Cape Town

For the last three decades, globalization has been a major theme of sociolinguistics and studies of multilingualism, in keeping with large scale changes evident in late-modern societies (Blommaert, 2010). One of several stances within this research is the importance accorded to English in processes of linguistic globalization (see Leung et al, 2009). Three theoretical stances in particular have dealt with English globalization: World Englishes (e.g. Kachru, 1986), Linguistic Imperialism (e.g. Phillipson, 1992) and more recently Global Englishes within a context of modern-day rapid transport, electronic media, cultural hybridities and economic migration (Pennycook, 2007). All three approaches emphasise different aspects of the nature of English insertion in multilingual contexts.

The challenge of contemporary South Africa is that of building a (post)nation of postracial equity in a fragmented world of a globalized ethical, economic and ecological meltdown. In this paper, we seek to explore the idea of multilingualism as a technology in the conceptualization of alternative, competing futures. We suggest that multilingualism is understood in terms of how encounters across difference are mediated and structured linguistically offer a space for interrupting colonial relationships. Furthermore, we argue that multilingualism should be approached as a site where colonial power dynamics of languages and speakers are troubled, and where the potential for new empowering linguistic mediations of the mutualities of our common humanity with different others are worked out.

In the last 19 years of post-apartheid South African democracy, race remains an enduring and familiar trope, a point of certainty amid the messy ambiguities of transformation. In the present article, we explore the malleable, permeable, and unstable racializations of contemporary South Arica, specifically the way in which coloured and white racializations are negotiated and interactionally accomplished in the context of Capetonian hip-hop. The analysis reveals the complex ways in which racialized bodies are figured semiotically through reference to historical time and contemporary (translocal) social space. But also the way iconic features of blackness are reindexicalized to stand for a transnational whiteness.

Williams, Q. (2016). Youth multilingualism in South Africa's hip-hop culture:A metapragmatic analysis. Sociolinguistic Studies, AbstractThis paper describes the practice of youth multilingualism in South Africa's hip-hop culture, in an online social media space and an advertising space. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork study of youth multilingual practices, comprising of the following data sets -multilingual interviews, observations, multilingual interactions and performances, documents and online social networking interactions -the paper reports on how young multilingual speakers active in the hip-hop culture of the country talk and write about the intermixing of racial and ethnic speech forms, as well as use registers in the practice of gendered identities. The argument I put forth in the paper is that the examples of youth multilingualism suggest a complex picture of youth multilingual contact in postcolonial South Africa, and one that require a sociocultural linguistic response that accounts for the cultural influence of youth multilingualisms in local hiphop culture. To such an end, I suggest that multilingual policy planning in the country should be readjusted to the complex sociocultural changes we see emerge with youth multilingual practices.

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It is difficult to point exactly to the day multilingual activism emerged in South African hip hop culture, though we can arguably state such activism emerged out of a confluence of historical events that involved the oppression of black and coloured people by an aggressively oppressive apartheid regime. This article discusses the tactics and strategies of multilingual activism undertaken by pioneering hip hop groups Prophets of da City at the inception of hip hop in South Africa. It considers the historical transition from apartheid South Africa to the new South Africa and how new and emerging forms of multilingual activism such as the AfriKaaps movement are contributing to redefining what we mean by multilingualism. The article also links these forms of multilingual activism to an alternative politics of multilingual voice being promoted in the public space of the country.