Room 4.03, Level 4, Harry Oppenheimer Institute

Miché Thompson is a senior lecturer in Linguistics in the Department of African Studies and Linguistics. She holds a PhD in General Linguistics from Stellenbosch University, and an MA in Linguistics from The University of the Western Cape. She currently serves on the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB) as a member of the English National Language Body. Her research broadly focuses on the sociolinguistics of language contact and migration within the South African Chinese diaspora, and the politics of identity and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa, respectively. 

Areas of Supervision

Multilingualism, Critical Discourse Analysis, Thematic analysis, Language and Media, Language and politics, Corpus Linguistics, Ecolinguistics, Climate change linguistics, Language Contact, Language and Migration, Language and Identity, Language and Religion, Language and social media

Courses Taught

ASL1300F Introduction to Language

ASL1301S Introduction to sociolinguistics

ASL2300F Social Media Linguistics

ASL2301S Language and the Mind

ASL3300F Second Language Acquisition

ASL4318/5310F Language contact and globalisation

ASL4322/5322S Research Methods: Analytical Frameworks

Current Research

Migration and contact linguistics

Language and Race

Language and Belonging

Language and Identity

Autoethnography 

Critical ecolinguistics

Latest publications:

Thompson, M. (2025). “If colored culture doesn’t exist: Protesting Colored erasure on social media in post-apartheid South Africa”, in Sociolinguistics of Protesting (vol 2), ed. A. Abdelhay, S. Makoni, and C. Severo, pp. 51-68. Germany: De Gryuter Mouton

Thompson, M. (2025). “Racialized relations: constructing the “other” through the discourse of prejudice in Chinatown in Cape Town, South Africa”, in The Routledge Handbook of Language and Race, ed. S. Makoni, B.E. Antia, and S. Rudwick, pp. 236-248. London: Routledge

Mpendukana, S. and Thompson, M. (2025). “Embodied moments of racialization in research”, in Looking Inward: Autoethnographic Explorations of Lived Raciolinguistic Experiences Among Multilingual Scholars, ed. Q. Zhang-Wu & B. Goodman, pp.123-139. Bristol: Multilingual Matters

Laurie, J. and Thompson, M. (2024). Fossil-fueled stories: An ecolinguistic critical discourse analysis of the South African government’s naturalisation of fossil fuels in the context of the climate crisis. Critical Discourse Studies. DOI:10.1080/17405904.2024.2366282
Thompson, M. (2022). Just Enough English to Get by: Language Practices of Transnational Migrants in Chinese Stores in Cape Town, South Africa. Bandung: Journal of the Global South 9(1-2): 134-159. doi:10.1163/21983534-09010006.

Deumert, A., Mpazayabo, S. & Thompson, M. (2021). Cape Town as a multilingual city: Policies, experiences and ideologies, in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and the City, ed. by T.K. Lee, pp 248-262. London: Routledge.

Thompson, M. & Anthonissen, C. (2019). Transnational Traders’ Discourse: Informal Language Policy Emerging in a South African Chinatown. Language Matters, 50:1, 3-24, doi: 10.1080/10228195.2018.1541926

Thompson, M. (2019). Chinatown as a multilingual workplace. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, Vol. 56, 59-64. doi: 10.5842/56-0-785