TPCS 22: Learning a supervernacular: textspeak in a South African township

By Jan Blommaert and Fie Velghe

1. Introduction: learning voice

In spite of strong and widespread beliefs to the contrary, people never learn ‘a language’. They always learn specific and specialized bits of language, sufficient to grant them voice – “the capacity to make oneself understood” by others (Blommaert 2005: 255). They learn voice by processes of enregistering semiotic forms – putting forms in a kind of order that generates conventionalized indexical meanings – and such processes of enregisterment involve complex and delicate orientations to existing or perceived norms (Agha 2007; Creese & Blackledge 2010; Jörgensen et al 2011; Juffermans & Van der Aa 2011 provide an overview and discussion). People’s repertoires, consequently, can be seen as an organized (‘ordered’) complex of semiotic traces of power: the semiotic resources they gathered in the course of their life are things they needed in order to be seen by others as a ‘normal’, understandable social being (Blommaert & Backus 2011).

Such learning processes, as we know, develop in a variety of learning environments and through a variety of learning modes, ranging from the tightly regimented and uniform learning modes that characterize schools and other formal learning environments, to fleeting and ephemeral ‘encounters’ with language in informal learning environments – as when a tourist learns the local word for beer in a foreign country, returning home with a microscopic amount of ‘foreign language’ along with the other souvenirs of the trip. Increasingly of course, the intensive use of online and mobile communication technologies opens a vast space of opportunities for such forms of informal learning, offering users access to vocabularies, registers, genres and styles, as well as cultural templates for practices (see e.g. Gee 2003; Leppänen & Piirainen-Marsh 2009; Varis & Wang 2011).

The latter kinds of informal learning will be central to our concern here, and there are several reasons for this. One has already been announced: we see a tremendous expansion of informal learning environments and practices, and an increasing number of researchers are directing their attention towards it. Secondly, the very nature of these modes of learning prompts us towards revisiting learning as an activity; the Vygotskian framework in which learning is both socioculturally and historically contextualized and mediated through instruments, objects and worlds of reference, appears to catch a second breath. And three, there is the reflexive dimension, in which our own scholarly modes of learning become more relevant as themes for inquiry than perhaps before. Our own knowledge procedures are, in effect, mostly grounded in informal learning practices, especially when we engage directly with informants in the field (cf Blommaert & Dong 2010; Velghe 2011), but similarly when we engage with people and their messages in the virtual world. So here is a case for taking informal learning seriously in an attempt to provide a more solid grounding for our own knowledge, and ultimately, our own voice.

In this paper, we will focus on the way in which a woman we call Linda acquires, maintains and deploys a ‘supervernacular’ (Blommaert 2011), and how she does this in conditions of extreme marginalization. The supervernacular in question is a variety of ‘textspeak’, a mobile phone texting code used in the Wesbank township near Cape Town, South Africa. As a variety of textspeak, the code used by Linda bears the usual characteristics of abbreviations, homophonic writing, emoticons and so forth; it is one of these extremely dynamic codes that characterize today’s new communicative environments. Linda, however, faces major problems: the macro-contextual circumstances of poverty, unemployment and social marginalization turn various forms of literacy into rare commodities; and to complicate things, her capacity for writing and reading is minimal; she is in all likelihood dyslectic. Notwithstanding these tremendous constraints, Linda uses textspeak intensively drawing on an intricate scaffolding system for literacy usage she developed herself.

In discussing the case of Linda’s use of textspeak, we will also have to consider the way in which the ethnographer’s own learning practices encountered Linda’s, and how this led to a new understanding of what textspeak is and what it means in communities such as the one we investigate. Linda’s case, thus, compelled us towards reflexivity. 

Let us start by preparing the canvas, and provide some backgrounds about the research on which we draw here and on some of our conceptual tools. We will first look into the contextual factors that define Linda’s life: the township where she lives, her own background, and the importance of mobile phones in her community. After that, we will turn to Linda’s own practices of learning and using textspeak

How to quote: Blommaert, J., & Velghe, F. (2012). Learning a supervernacular: Textspeak in a South African township. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 22).

Read the full working paper here: Learning a supervernacular: Textspeak in a South African township.