Finex Ndhlovu
Biographic Data
| ID | 137436 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Finex Ndhlovu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Finex |
| FAMILY NAME | Ndhlovu |
| SIGNATURE | NDHLOVU F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of New England |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9263-0725 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 62 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Resistance Ethics for a Decolonial Sociolinguistics
Ethics is among those institutional categories of the research process that are perceived as inherently motivated by good intentions to protect, respect and safeguard the dignity and interests of research participants. However, the entanglements of the institution of research ethics with the broader project of the coloniality of universalism are rarely questioned. In responding to the lead article of this Dialogue, I posit that there are several …
Troubling sociolinguistics practice and the coloniality of universalism
The quite contemporary epistemological postures that are critical of the dominance of Euro-modernist knowledge traditions are sometimes guilty of inadvertently perpetuating the very same hegemonies they seek to unsettle. For this reason, the intervention by Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa is timely and relevant. In re-assessing the “common sense” assumptions that belie the concept of “raciolinguistics,” Flores and Rosa remind us of the need to pi…
Pan-African identities and literacies: The orthographic harmonisation debate revisited
From the 1940s to the mid-1950s, South African intellectual and political activist, Jacob Mfaniselwa Nhlapo, championed the forging of African political unity through harmonising writing systems for mutually related African language varieties. Owing to his diverse intellectual, professional and political background – a scholar, lawyer, journalist, and political activist – Nhlapo proposed harmonisation not as a purely linguistic enterprise, but as…
Revisiting the true purpose of the discourse on decolonising
The human and social science communities have over a long time committed themselves to the pursuit of an ever-growing list of new conceptual frameworks, but often only to rob such theories of profundity in the end. Such habits and practices reduce into ‘slogan’ ideas that otherwise hold the promise for robust interrogation of how we came to be where we are. In this article, I extend scholarly conversations in cultural discourse studies (CDS) that…
Decolonising sociolinguistics research: Methodological Turn-Around Next
This short article argues that notwithstanding theoretical advances that have sought to unsettle the hegemony of mainstream theoretical frameworks, language in society researchers and other social science scholarly communities from the Southern orbit of the globe, continue to be wedded to conventional Euro-modernist methodologies. I suggest that the need to delink from imperial logics of doing research is a must and not an option. We need a langu…
Why Ecology of Knowledges and Multilingual Habitus Matter in Higher Degree Research Student Training
Scholars speaking from Southern perspectives have long argued in favor of recognizing diverse ways of knowing and against the hegemony of Euro-modernist epistemologies that have crystallized into orthodoxy within the academy. Euro-modernist epistemologies proceed from positivist “scientific” principles that turn a blind eye to the diversity of ways of reading and interpreting social experience. They reflect and represent subjective perceptions ab…
South Africa’s social transformation policies: Raciolinguistic ideologies and neoliberal rhetoric
South Africa has a politically and emotionally charged debate on unresolved race-based imbalances in patterns of land ownership and access to socio-economic opportunities. The main pillars of South Africa’s post-apartheid efforts to address these inherent inequalities have come to be underpinned by invocation of a predominantly neoliberal yet narrow and inward-looking approach that overlooks the discourse of previously marginalised black people. …
Reading Robert Mugabe Through the Third Chimurenga: Language, Discourse, Exclusion
Language policy and economics: The language question in Africa
This is a review of: NKONKO M. KAMWANGAMALU, Language policy and economics: The language question in Africa. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. xxv + 232 pp
The Social and Political History of Southern Africa's Languages
This book is the first to offer an interdisciplinary and comprehensive reference work on the often-marginalised languages of southern Africa. The authors analyse a range of different concepts and ques
Vernacular discourse, emergent political languages and belonging in Southern Africa
Although academic debates and conversations on the subject of identity formation are numerous and too well known to rehearse, much of their focus has generally been on the discourse of the empowered; that is the discourse of those who control, design and create the public space. Such a focus overlooks the fact that identities are multi-layered, self-imposed and contested just as they are ascribed by others and, therefore, require a critical analy…
Language, Vernacular Discourse and Nationalisms: Uncovering the Myths of Transnational Worlds
Southern development discourse for Southern Africa: Linguistic and cultural imperatives
Although Africa’s dependency on the West is understandably rooted in economic and political developments that have a long historical trajectory, it is also an epistemological issue. The current push for a shift away from traditional dependency on Western countries is untenable as Africa’s economic development pathways continue to be informed by Euro-American epistemologies. This stifles creative and innovative thinking in ways other than those fr…
A decolonial critique of diaspora identity theories and the notion of superdiversity
Superdiversity is among the latest theories of diaspora cultural identities from the Global North inspired by the failures and limitations of multiculturalist social policies of the twentieth century. This paper addresses the question to what extent do theoretical suppositions of superdiversity constitute a genuine and radical departure from the logics of multiculturalism. The paper concludes that superdiversity suffers from the same limitations …
Ignored Lingualism: Another Resource for Overcoming the Monolingual Mindset in Language Education Policy
Mainstream academic conversations in sociolinguistics and language education policy have for a long time questioned the deep-seated habit of assuming monolingualism as the norm for all individuals and societies - what has been termed the monolingual mindset. However, most research has done so using modernist linguistic ideologies that perpetuate myths about the nature of language. Consequently, there still remain strong pockets of influential con…
The idea of southern Africa in the humanities and social science disciplines
The role of the academy in the manufacture of individual and group identities remains least understood from theoretical and empirical perspectives. The legitimation and consumption of such identity discourses (by both academic practitioners and the general public) have also been inadequately theorised. What is well known and heavily theorised is the subject of how disciplines have created their own identities but the consequence of such disciplin…
Becoming an African Diaspora in Australia: Language, Culture, Identity
Becoming an African Diaspora in Australia extends debates on identities, cultures and notions of race and racism into new directions as it analyses the forms of interactional identities of African mig
Language Nesting, Superdiversity and African Diasporas in Regional Australia
This paper tells previously untold stories about the dynamic cultures, linguistic repertoires and language practices of migrants and refugees that are continuously shaped and mediated by the convoluted histories, journeys and migration itineraries of these people. It brings to light the effect of proficiency in multiple languages on their speakers' affiliations, and their perceptions of belonging in local communities. The paper draws on the outco…
Cross-border Languages in Southern African Economic and Political Integration
Although the subject of southern African regional integration has attracted the most attention from a political, economic and trade perspective, it has remained least understood or researched sociolinguistically. This article deals with the questions about the role of the state and local community agency in the formation and legitimation of identities. It provides a counter-narrative on the subject of cross-border languages and their intersection…
Post-refugee African Australians' perceptions about being and becoming Australian: Language, Discourse and Participation
This article provides recent empirical evidence to support the argument that the everyday politics of race and fear of the non-desired Other still persist in Australia more than half a century after the official demise of the White Australia Policy. The article sheds so me insight into how Australian immigration policies are now deliberately designed to normalise and assimilate new migrants into narrow Anglo-Saxon cultural and linguistic norms, t…
Language politics in postcolonial Africa revisited: Minority agency and language imposition
This article returns to the knotty question of minority language maintenance in the face of impositions of hegemonic national language(s) in postcolonial Africa. Drawing on postcolonial resistance theories, empirical data on the language ecology of Zimbabwe and case studies from other multilingual African contexts, the article is a rethink of the agency of minority ethnolinguistic groups to the declining use of their languages. The article confro…
Belonging and Attitudes towards Ethnic Languages among African Migrants in Australia
Based on data from a research project on African identities in Melbourne, this paper assesses the attitudes of non-refugee African-Australians towards their ethnic languages in the context of the utility and prestige of English in Australia. The paper explores the tensions between discourses on rights to language(s) of choice and discourses on conforming to prescribed languages. It opens new questions about ethnic language loyalty and language ma…
The limitations of language and nationality as prime markers of African Diaspora identities in the State of Victoria1
This paper suggests that African migrants in Australia are often seen as a homogenous group of people with very little if any difference among them. The popular line of thinking about who Africans are appears to go like this: because they all look alike (by virtue of the colour of their skin), originate from the same continent (Africa) and are presumed to be speakers of perceived ‘standard’ African languages, then their behaviours, their needs, t…
The Conundrums of Language Policy and Politics in South Africa and Zimbabwe
This article reflects on and reinterprets South Africa's documented human rights-inspired language policy and Zimbabwe's assimilation–tolerance approach to language use. The overall intention is to expose and discuss the intolerant, undemocratic and homogenizing ideologies underpinning language policy in the two neighbouring southern African countries. The article spotlights the ceremonial ‘official language’ status of South Africa's nine African…
The Role of Discourse in Identity Formation and the Manufacture of Ethnic Minorities in Zimbabwe
The notion of ethnic minorities is a highly contested subject that cannot be fully explained in terms of demographic facts alone as it is indexically linked to struggles over sociopolitical power, cultural domination and control. Ethnic minorities have to be conceptualised as fluid and transitory phenomena mediated and reconstituted by various forms of discursive practices. Drawing on primary and secondary data collected in Zimbabwe, this paper p…
Decolonising sociolinguistics research: Methodological Turn-Around Next
This short article argues that notwithstanding theoretical advances that have sought to unsettle the hegemony of mainstream theoretical frameworks, language in society researchers and other social science scholarly communities from the Southern orbit of the globe, continue to be wedded to conventional Euro-modernist methodologies. I suggest that the need to delink from imperial logics of doing research is a must and not an option. We need a langu…
South Africa’s social transformation policies: Raciolinguistic ideologies and neoliberal rhetoric
South Africa has a politically and emotionally charged debate on unresolved race-based imbalances in patterns of land ownership and access to socio-economic opportunities. The main pillars of South Africa’s post-apartheid efforts to address these inherent inequalities have come to be underpinned by invocation of a predominantly neoliberal yet narrow and inward-looking approach that overlooks the discourse of previously marginalised black people. …
Ignored Lingualism: Another Resource for Overcoming the Monolingual Mindset in Language Education Policy
Mainstream academic conversations in sociolinguistics and language education policy have for a long time questioned the deep-seated habit of assuming monolingualism as the norm for all individuals and societies - what has been termed the monolingual mindset. However, most research has done so using modernist linguistic ideologies that perpetuate myths about the nature of language. Consequently, there still remain strong pockets of influential con…
Gramsci, Doke and the Marginalisation of the Ndebele Language in Zimbabwe
Clement M. Doke's 1929–1930 research on Zimbabwean languages has played a key role in shaping the tribalised and politicised linguistic terrain that characterises modern Zimbabwe. Doke, professor of linguistics at the University of Witwaters-rand, was commissioned in 1929 by the government of Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) to research the language varieties spoken by Zimbabwean natives. His work, which was premised on the quest for stan…
Cross-border Languages in Southern African Economic and Political Integration
Although the subject of southern African regional integration has attracted the most attention from a political, economic and trade perspective, it has remained least understood or researched sociolinguistically. This article deals with the questions about the role of the state and local community agency in the formation and legitimation of identities. It provides a counter-narrative on the subject of cross-border languages and their intersection…
Post-refugee African Australians' perceptions about being and becoming Australian: Language, Discourse and Participation
This article provides recent empirical evidence to support the argument that the everyday politics of race and fear of the non-desired Other still persist in Australia more than half a century after the official demise of the White Australia Policy. The article sheds so me insight into how Australian immigration policies are now deliberately designed to normalise and assimilate new migrants into narrow Anglo-Saxon cultural and linguistic norms, t…
Troubling sociolinguistics practice and the coloniality of universalism
The quite contemporary epistemological postures that are critical of the dominance of Euro-modernist knowledge traditions are sometimes guilty of inadvertently perpetuating the very same hegemonies they seek to unsettle. For this reason, the intervention by Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa is timely and relevant. In re-assessing the “common sense” assumptions that belie the concept of “raciolinguistics,” Flores and Rosa remind us of the need to pi…
The Role of Discourse in Identity Formation and the Manufacture of Ethnic Minorities in Zimbabwe
The notion of ethnic minorities is a highly contested subject that cannot be fully explained in terms of demographic facts alone as it is indexically linked to struggles over sociopolitical power, cultural domination and control. Ethnic minorities have to be conceptualised as fluid and transitory phenomena mediated and reconstituted by various forms of discursive practices. Drawing on primary and secondary data collected in Zimbabwe, this paper p…
Southern development discourse for Southern Africa: Linguistic and cultural imperatives
Although Africa’s dependency on the West is understandably rooted in economic and political developments that have a long historical trajectory, it is also an epistemological issue. The current push for a shift away from traditional dependency on Western countries is untenable as Africa’s economic development pathways continue to be informed by Euro-American epistemologies. This stifles creative and innovative thinking in ways other than those fr…
The Conundrums of Language Policy and Politics in South Africa and Zimbabwe
This article reflects on and reinterprets South Africa's documented human rights-inspired language policy and Zimbabwe's assimilation–tolerance approach to language use. The overall intention is to expose and discuss the intolerant, undemocratic and homogenizing ideologies underpinning language policy in the two neighbouring southern African countries. The article spotlights the ceremonial ‘official language’ status of South Africa's nine African…
Revisiting the true purpose of the discourse on decolonising
The human and social science communities have over a long time committed themselves to the pursuit of an ever-growing list of new conceptual frameworks, but often only to rob such theories of profundity in the end. Such habits and practices reduce into ‘slogan’ ideas that otherwise hold the promise for robust interrogation of how we came to be where we are. In this article, I extend scholarly conversations in cultural discourse studies (CDS) that…
Why Ecology of Knowledges and Multilingual Habitus Matter in Higher Degree Research Student Training
Scholars speaking from Southern perspectives have long argued in favor of recognizing diverse ways of knowing and against the hegemony of Euro-modernist epistemologies that have crystallized into orthodoxy within the academy. Euro-modernist epistemologies proceed from positivist “scientific” principles that turn a blind eye to the diversity of ways of reading and interpreting social experience. They reflect and represent subjective perceptions ab…
Reading Robert Mugabe Through the Third Chimurenga: Language, Discourse, Exclusion
Language Nesting, Superdiversity and African Diasporas in Regional Australia
This paper tells previously untold stories about the dynamic cultures, linguistic repertoires and language practices of migrants and refugees that are continuously shaped and mediated by the convoluted histories, journeys and migration itineraries of these people. It brings to light the effect of proficiency in multiple languages on their speakers' affiliations, and their perceptions of belonging in local communities. The paper draws on the outco…
The limitations of language and nationality as prime markers of African Diaspora identities in the State of Victoria1
This paper suggests that African migrants in Australia are often seen as a homogenous group of people with very little if any difference among them. The popular line of thinking about who Africans are appears to go like this: because they all look alike (by virtue of the colour of their skin), originate from the same continent (Africa) and are presumed to be speakers of perceived ‘standard’ African languages, then their behaviours, their needs, t…
Belonging and Attitudes towards Ethnic Languages among African Migrants in Australia
Based on data from a research project on African identities in Melbourne, this paper assesses the attitudes of non-refugee African-Australians towards their ethnic languages in the context of the utility and prestige of English in Australia. The paper explores the tensions between discourses on rights to language(s) of choice and discourses on conforming to prescribed languages. It opens new questions about ethnic language loyalty and language ma…
Gramsci, Doke and the Marginalisation of the Ndebele Language in Zimbabwe
Clement M. Doke's 1929–1930 research on Zimbabwean languages has played a key role in shaping the tribalised and politicised linguistic terrain that characterises modern Zimbabwe. Doke, professor of linguistics at the University of Witwaters-rand, was commissioned in 1929 by the government of Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) to research the language varieties spoken by Zimbabwean natives. His work, which was premised on the quest for stan…
The Role of Discourse in Identity Formation and the Manufacture of Ethnic Minorities in Zimbabwe
The notion of ethnic minorities is a highly contested subject that cannot be fully explained in terms of demographic facts alone as it is indexically linked to struggles over sociopolitical power, cultural domination and control. Ethnic minorities have to be conceptualised as fluid and transitory phenomena mediated and reconstituted by various forms of discursive practices. Drawing on primary and secondary data collected in Zimbabwe, this paper p…
The Conundrums of Language Policy and Politics in South Africa and Zimbabwe
This article reflects on and reinterprets South Africa's documented human rights-inspired language policy and Zimbabwe's assimilation–tolerance approach to language use. The overall intention is to expose and discuss the intolerant, undemocratic and homogenizing ideologies underpinning language policy in the two neighbouring southern African countries. The article spotlights the ceremonial ‘official language’ status of South Africa's nine African…
The limitations of language and nationality as prime markers of African Diaspora identities in the State of Victoria1
This paper suggests that African migrants in Australia are often seen as a homogenous group of people with very little if any difference among them. The popular line of thinking about who Africans are appears to go like this: because they all look alike (by virtue of the colour of their skin), originate from the same continent (Africa) and are presumed to be speakers of perceived ‘standard’ African languages, then their behaviours, their needs, t…
Language politics in postcolonial Africa revisited: Minority agency and language imposition
This article returns to the knotty question of minority language maintenance in the face of impositions of hegemonic national language(s) in postcolonial Africa. Drawing on postcolonial resistance theories, empirical data on the language ecology of Zimbabwe and case studies from other multilingual African contexts, the article is a rethink of the agency of minority ethnolinguistic groups to the declining use of their languages. The article confro…
Belonging and Attitudes towards Ethnic Languages among African Migrants in Australia
Based on data from a research project on African identities in Melbourne, this paper assesses the attitudes of non-refugee African-Australians towards their ethnic languages in the context of the utility and prestige of English in Australia. The paper explores the tensions between discourses on rights to language(s) of choice and discourses on conforming to prescribed languages. It opens new questions about ethnic language loyalty and language ma…
Post-refugee African Australians' perceptions about being and becoming Australian: Language, Discourse and Participation
This article provides recent empirical evidence to support the argument that the everyday politics of race and fear of the non-desired Other still persist in Australia more than half a century after the official demise of the White Australia Policy. The article sheds so me insight into how Australian immigration policies are now deliberately designed to normalise and assimilate new migrants into narrow Anglo-Saxon cultural and linguistic norms, t…
Language Nesting, Superdiversity and African Diasporas in Regional Australia
This paper tells previously untold stories about the dynamic cultures, linguistic repertoires and language practices of migrants and refugees that are continuously shaped and mediated by the convoluted histories, journeys and migration itineraries of these people. It brings to light the effect of proficiency in multiple languages on their speakers' affiliations, and their perceptions of belonging in local communities. The paper draws on the outco…
Cross-border Languages in Southern African Economic and Political Integration
Although the subject of southern African regional integration has attracted the most attention from a political, economic and trade perspective, it has remained least understood or researched sociolinguistically. This article deals with the questions about the role of the state and local community agency in the formation and legitimation of identities. It provides a counter-narrative on the subject of cross-border languages and their intersection…
The idea of southern Africa in the humanities and social science disciplines
The role of the academy in the manufacture of individual and group identities remains least understood from theoretical and empirical perspectives. The legitimation and consumption of such identity discourses (by both academic practitioners and the general public) have also been inadequately theorised. What is well known and heavily theorised is the subject of how disciplines have created their own identities but the consequence of such disciplin…
Becoming an African Diaspora in Australia: Language, Culture, Identity
Becoming an African Diaspora in Australia extends debates on identities, cultures and notions of race and racism into new directions as it analyses the forms of interactional identities of African mig
Ignored Lingualism: Another Resource for Overcoming the Monolingual Mindset in Language Education Policy
Mainstream academic conversations in sociolinguistics and language education policy have for a long time questioned the deep-seated habit of assuming monolingualism as the norm for all individuals and societies - what has been termed the monolingual mindset. However, most research has done so using modernist linguistic ideologies that perpetuate myths about the nature of language. Consequently, there still remain strong pockets of influential con…
A decolonial critique of diaspora identity theories and the notion of superdiversity
Superdiversity is among the latest theories of diaspora cultural identities from the Global North inspired by the failures and limitations of multiculturalist social policies of the twentieth century. This paper addresses the question to what extent do theoretical suppositions of superdiversity constitute a genuine and radical departure from the logics of multiculturalism. The paper concludes that superdiversity suffers from the same limitations …
Southern development discourse for Southern Africa: Linguistic and cultural imperatives
Although Africa’s dependency on the West is understandably rooted in economic and political developments that have a long historical trajectory, it is also an epistemological issue. The current push for a shift away from traditional dependency on Western countries is untenable as Africa’s economic development pathways continue to be informed by Euro-American epistemologies. This stifles creative and innovative thinking in ways other than those fr…
The Social and Political History of Southern Africa's Languages
This book is the first to offer an interdisciplinary and comprehensive reference work on the often-marginalised languages of southern Africa. The authors analyse a range of different concepts and ques
Vernacular discourse, emergent political languages and belonging in Southern Africa
Although academic debates and conversations on the subject of identity formation are numerous and too well known to rehearse, much of their focus has generally been on the discourse of the empowered; that is the discourse of those who control, design and create the public space. Such a focus overlooks the fact that identities are multi-layered, self-imposed and contested just as they are ascribed by others and, therefore, require a critical analy…
Language, Vernacular Discourse and Nationalisms: Uncovering the Myths of Transnational Worlds
South Africa’s social transformation policies: Raciolinguistic ideologies and neoliberal rhetoric
South Africa has a politically and emotionally charged debate on unresolved race-based imbalances in patterns of land ownership and access to socio-economic opportunities. The main pillars of South Africa’s post-apartheid efforts to address these inherent inequalities have come to be underpinned by invocation of a predominantly neoliberal yet narrow and inward-looking approach that overlooks the discourse of previously marginalised black people. …
Reading Robert Mugabe Through the Third Chimurenga: Language, Discourse, Exclusion
Language policy and economics: The language question in Africa
This is a review of: NKONKO M. KAMWANGAMALU, Language policy and economics: The language question in Africa. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. xxv + 232 pp
Why Ecology of Knowledges and Multilingual Habitus Matter in Higher Degree Research Student Training
Scholars speaking from Southern perspectives have long argued in favor of recognizing diverse ways of knowing and against the hegemony of Euro-modernist epistemologies that have crystallized into orthodoxy within the academy. Euro-modernist epistemologies proceed from positivist “scientific” principles that turn a blind eye to the diversity of ways of reading and interpreting social experience. They reflect and represent subjective perceptions ab…
Decolonising sociolinguistics research: Methodological Turn-Around Next
This short article argues that notwithstanding theoretical advances that have sought to unsettle the hegemony of mainstream theoretical frameworks, language in society researchers and other social science scholarly communities from the Southern orbit of the globe, continue to be wedded to conventional Euro-modernist methodologies. I suggest that the need to delink from imperial logics of doing research is a must and not an option. We need a langu…
Pan-African identities and literacies: The orthographic harmonisation debate revisited
From the 1940s to the mid-1950s, South African intellectual and political activist, Jacob Mfaniselwa Nhlapo, championed the forging of African political unity through harmonising writing systems for mutually related African language varieties. Owing to his diverse intellectual, professional and political background – a scholar, lawyer, journalist, and political activist – Nhlapo proposed harmonisation not as a purely linguistic enterprise, but as…
Revisiting the true purpose of the discourse on decolonising
The human and social science communities have over a long time committed themselves to the pursuit of an ever-growing list of new conceptual frameworks, but often only to rob such theories of profundity in the end. Such habits and practices reduce into ‘slogan’ ideas that otherwise hold the promise for robust interrogation of how we came to be where we are. In this article, I extend scholarly conversations in cultural discourse studies (CDS) that…
Troubling sociolinguistics practice and the coloniality of universalism
The quite contemporary epistemological postures that are critical of the dominance of Euro-modernist knowledge traditions are sometimes guilty of inadvertently perpetuating the very same hegemonies they seek to unsettle. For this reason, the intervention by Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa is timely and relevant. In re-assessing the “common sense” assumptions that belie the concept of “raciolinguistics,” Flores and Rosa remind us of the need to pi…
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (21 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (20 works) · Politics (18 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Linguistics (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Anthropology (10 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Social science (8 works)