Cognitive-conceptual approaches to multilingual repertoires in South Africa and their implications for the study of linguistic registers

Abstract

Arguing from the perspective of the triad language-culture-cognition, this paper re-analyses metalinguistic reflections from South African language portraits with the aim of providing evidence for cognitive-conceptual motivations for the context-dependent preference of certain languages over others. It argues that languages in the South African multilingual ecology appear as clearly assigned to certain high-/low-prestige domains and hence function as linguistic registers. These emerge as cognitive-conceptual responses to complex ‘contexts of situation’, i.e., domains of language use, which can be described/defined in terms of distinct modes of action governed by sociocultural norms, conventions, ideologies, statuses, identities, degrees of formality etc., as well as pragmatic uses of verbal acts. All in all, the metalinguistic reflections of participants yield evidence for how underlying sociocultural conceptualisations both of languages in multilingual repertoires and of linguistic registers in multilingual ecologies translate into what can be labelled ‘sociocognitive load’ that influences register choices. This reveals the structuredness of distributed sociocultural cognition and intra- and interspeaker metalinguistic reflection that governs language-as-register choices in South Africa’s multilingual landscape.