PhD position (b) ERC project, University of Cape Town

The San and Khoi Centre at the University of Cape Town invites applications for a PhD position in the project “Multilingual worlds – neglected histories. Uncovering their emergence, continuity and loss in past and present societies” Horizon 2020 Grant ERC-Consolidator Grant (MULTILING-HIST) coordinated by the University of Warsaw, Poland. The fundamental aim of the project is to reconstruct, explain and better understand the mechanisms and causality of the processes behind the emergence, continuity, reduction, and loss (as well as possible re-emergence) of multilingualism in differing historical, geographical, social, political, and cultural contexts. The project embraces historical and contemporary multilingual milieux from four regions relevant for understanding the causal frameworks underlying multilingual trajectories, i.e., selected historical multilingual hotspots from Central-Eastern Europe, Mesoamerica, the Archipelago of Vanuatu, and South Africa. The case studies, including the South African part of the project, will offer a novel possibility to examine the ‘invisibility’ of multilingualism and uncover its neglected history(ies). To achieve these goals, the project adopts a multidisciplinary approach: it combines historical and contemporary data, qualitative and quantitative methods as well as mathematical modeling, data-driven mapping, and GIS mapping.

The position at the San and Khoi Centre will cover 3 years of PhD studies at the University of Cape Town with the total scholarship sum of approx. 480.000 rand or 160.000 rand per year.

The PhD candidate is expected to study the socio-historical aspects of multilingualism related to Khoi and/or San communities spread across the Western-Cape that used to speak Khoi and/or San varieties and the gradual language loss among Khoi and/or San speakers and their transition to other linguistic communities (from the late 18th to the 21st century). The candidate will explore multi-level dimensions of historical and contemporary multilingualism and examine the synchrony and diachrony of multilingualism at an individual and societal level from a historical and sociolinguistic perspective. Among others, the candidate will focus on multilingual competence and socialization, vertical and horizontal transmission, inter-ethnic marriages and relationships, language ideologies and linguistic practices. The candidate will use both qualitative (e.g., language biographies and language portraits) and quantitative tools (e.g., questionnaires developed in the MULITLING-HIST project) and investigate the historical multilingualism of Khoi and/or San speakers/communities through both archival and field research.