‘Votescapes’: Linguistic landscape and party language policy during the 2019 South African election

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the use and visibility of languages on election posters through the concept of Linguistic Landscapes (LL). Hence, the following research question was the core of this study: What languages were used during the 2019 national election, and how linguistically inclusive are the election posters? Linguistic Landscapes is not only a purely linguistic phenomenon but rather reflects the reciprocal relationship between Linguistic Landscapes and the surrounding communities, their language usage, and society at large. Data collection took place in three provinces of South Africa: the Eastern Cape, Gauteng, and North West, resulting in 218 photographs of election posters. Two provinces with a clear dominance of one African Language and one very multilingual province were chosen. Within those three provinces, a more rural and semi-urban research site in the North West and in the Eastern Cape were selected, and a few residential areas in the metropolitan area of Johannesburg. Political parties differed significantly in their ‘votescape’, their linguistic landscape and their party language policies during their 2019 national election campaigns. The main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), frequently used African languages and ran an inclusive campaign, considering regional language concentrations despite their vague party language policy. By contrast, another opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), used an exclusively English approach. This was quite surprising, as this party aims to portray itself as ‘grounded’ and can be seen as a nationalist party. Further, their political agenda favours African languages in their party programme. The African National Congress’ (ANC) strategy also included African Languages in their campaign, and those became visible in the ‘Votescape’ the election Linguistic Landscapes on the election posters. Linguistic and cultural hybridity did occur but only appeared on isolated election posters. Overall, most parties mainly used English, and the VF PLUS mainly used Afrikaans. The only party visibility score with a more balanced language distribution was that of the DA. African languages were under-represented, and there were significant geographical differences and between the competing parties. With North West Setswana was very visible on election posters and some isiXhosa was visible on the Votescape in Eastern Cape, but far more different African Languages were visible in the multilingual province of Gauteng.

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