Focusing on the author’s first encounters with Finnegans Wake, this chapter reexamines the distinction between what is supposedly “intrinsic” and what is “extrinsic” to the experience of reading. The context in this case was not simply apartheid South Africa in the mid-1980s. More directly relevant, at least for one initiate into the mysteries and global effects of the Wake, was the looming presence of the 1820s Settler Monument in Grahamstown, now Makhanda, a center for the arts inaugurated in 1974 and designed to commemorate British settler traditions and celebrate the English language. Joyce’s last and most eccentric foray into literary writing, it turns out, constitutes a powerful refutation of the monument’s founding assumptions and of the act of monumentalization itself.

This chapter investigates what differentiates Standard isiXhosa, often referred to by speakers as 'deep isiXhosa', from other urban varieties of the language, including Tsotsitaal. It focuses on how the standard variety has an established status, although it is seldom strictly adhered to; dialects and lexical borrowing being some of the key historical drivers of variation in the grammar and vocabulary of the language. Contemporary deviation from the standard is exemplified in the chapter, which draws from research into the speech of the national isiXhosa radio station’s announcers and listeners and into the way young isiXhosa speakers use the language. The data show a flux in the concordial system of isiXhosa, a proliferation of English loanwords and ludic inclusions of Sesotho and Tsotsitaal.

This chapter seeks to explore the potential of increasing epistemological access for university students of African languages through the translation of English academic texts. It uses charts and tables to illustrate the negative effects that the scarcity of academic texts written in African languages has on students’ academic performance. A scientific text based on periodontal examination was translated from English to isiXhosa. Thereafter, ten test questions based on this text were drawn up using Bloom’s Taxonomy model. These questions were made available in both English and isiXhosa and were distributed among twenty-five first-year students of an isiXhosa mother tongue course. In this group, thirteen students wrote the test in isiXhosa, while twelve of them wrote it in English. The test results were compared to investigate whether students obtain higher marks when taught and examined in their first language or in their additional language. Ultimately, the researcher tried to investigate whether or not there is a relationship between students’ academic performance and their language of teaching and learning (LoTL). Furthermore, the study investigated the significance of mother-tongue-based education for curriculum access.

This chapter explores the consequences on isiXhosa of its long contact with the socio-politically dominant English language. It is shown that after nearly two centuries of English hegemony isiXhosa speakers have become increasingly bilingual in English and regularly switch between English and isiXhosa in their daily conversations. This in turn has led to heavy borrowing from English into isiXhosa. Based on code-switching data drawn from twenty naturally occurring conversations recorded in Gauteng and the Eastern Cape, the chapter reveals that English prepositions occur regularly in isiXhosa speech, including in contexts that would easily qualify as isiXhosa monolingual speech. The occurrence of these English closed-class items in isiXhosa spaces suggests that English has or is about to penetrate the grammatical structure of isiXhosa. The findings of this study point to a possible weakening of isiXhosa grammatical structure under heavy pressure from the more dominant English language.