Room A3, AC Jordan Building

Prof. Rajend Mesthrie – B. Paed. (Durban-Westville), B.A. Hons (UNISA), B.A. Hons (UCT), M.A. (Texas), PhD (UCT)

National Research Foundation Research Chair (Language, Migration & Social Change)

Honorary life executive member - Linguistics Society of Southern Africa

President - International Congress of Linguists (ICL20), Cape Town 2018

About Professor Rajend Mesthrie

My interests are in general linguistics, my main early training being in historical linguistics, especially the history of English.  However, my main recent research has been of a sociolinguistic nature, stressing language variation and contact in the South African context.  In the past I’ve worked on Bhojpuri-Hindi, English dialects, Fanakalo pidgin, and second language varieties of Zulu; and wrote occasional papers on Tamil in KZN and English-Afrikaans code switching in 19th C Cape.  In the 1990s many of us worked on the sociology of language in our multilingual South African context. These days I’m working more specifically on sociophonetics and English dialectology in South Africa.  But I encourage students to work on African languages and have provided supervision in the field of language contact and variation for languages like Chasu (of Tanzania), Luhya (of Kenya), Chichewa (of Malawi), Town Bemba (of Zambia) etc.

Interests and Current Research Projects

General Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Socio-historical Linguistics, Language Contact & Variation, South African Englishes, Indian diaspora.

Recent Publications

Among Prof. Mesthrie’s publications are Language in South Africa (2002, ed.), World Englishes (with Rakesh Bhatt, 2008), Introducing Sociolinguistics (with Joan Swan, Ana Deumert and William Leap, 2nd ed. 2009), A Dictionary of South African Indian English (2010), A Handbook of Sociolinguistics (2103, ed.), and the more “popular” book, Eish, but is it English?: celebrating the South African variety (arising from a series of interviews with journalist Jeanne Hromnik, 2013). 

Recent article: Mesthrie, R. 2017. Class, gender, and substrate erasure in sociolinguistic change: A sociophonetic study of schwa in deracializing South African English. Language, 93(2), pp.314-346.