Emeritus Professor Rajend Mesthrie

Honorary Professor

Room A3, AC Jordan Building

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

Senior Research Scholar

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

Honorary Life Executive Member - Linguistics Society of Southern Africa

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

International Fellow of the British Academy

Honorary Life Member of the Linguistic Society of America

 

About Professor Rajend Mesthrie

My interests are in general linguistics, my main early training being in historical linguistics, including the history of English.  My main subsequent research has been of a sociolinguistic nature, stressing language variation and contact in the Southern African context.   I’ve worked extensively on Bhojpuri-Hindi, English dialects, Fanakalo pidgin, second language varieties of isiZulu, innovations in Gauteng isiXhosa and variation in Tsotsitaal.  I’ve written additional papers on Tamil in KZN, English-Afrikaans code switching in 19th C Cape, and Gujarati and Kokni in Cape Town. In the 1990s many of us worked on the sociology of language in our multilingual South African context.  Since 2008, my research has covered (a) sociophonetics and English dialectology in South Africa and (b) language contact in Southern African contexts involving African languages.  I 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), isiXhosa (of Gauteng), siSwati (of eSwatini) and of Indian languages like Gujarati and Kokni. 

Interests and Current Research Projects

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

Recent Publications

Among Prof. Mesthrie’s book publications are Language in South Africa (2002, ed.), Language in the Indian Diaspora (2024, ed., with Sonal Kulkarni-Joshi), The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics around the World (2024, ed, with Martin Ball & Chiara Meluzzi) and Introducing Sociolinguistics (with Joan Swan & Rebecca Starr, 3rd ed. 2026). 

Notable recent articles: 

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.

Mesthrie, R. & L. Mfazwe-Mojapelo 2023. Speaking isiXhosa multilingually: a study of contact innovations among Xhosa speakers in Soweto.  Language Dynamics & Change 14(1):1-35.