Room 9, AC Jordan Building

Dr Miché Thompson (she/her) is a lecturer and sociolinguist in the Linguistics programme. She holds a PhD from Stellenbosch University. Her current area of research is the sociolinguistics of migration, with a focus on the Chinese diaspora in South Africa in the economic domain,  while also drawing on recent debates around China’s political engagement in South Africa. Her research interests include critical race theory and the politics of identity in South Africa, multilingualism and linguistic repertoires, critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, intercultural communication, and theories of migration and social change.

She teaches on a wide range of topics in linguistics including psycholinguistics and language acquisition, social media linguistics, language contact and globalisation, research methodology, and language maintenance and shift, to name a few.

She supervises postgraduate research projects in the following areas: language and migration studies, multilingualism, language policy, language and religion, linguistic landscapes and geosemiotics, media and political critical discourse analysis, workplace discourse, language and gender, language and race, and language use in social media.

Latest publications:

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.China Town as a multilingual workplace. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, Vol. 56, 59-64 doi: 10.5842/56-0-785