Being English in multilingual South Africa

Abstract The multilingual repertoires of African home language and bilingual Afrikaans‐English speakers in South Africa have been investigated comprehensively in the recent past. Less attention has been paid to the language repertoires of English home language speakers. Very little is known about the nature of their repertoires and their attitudes towards the languages in their repertoires. These Inner Circle users of English are immersed in a deeply multilingual Outer Circle society where most individuals know at least two languages and the majority of the citizens know more than four languages. The use of English as a home language is also expanding in this context. In this paper, the language repertoires of urban English home language students that participated in a longitudinal language repertoire survey and a group who created language portraits are examined with a view to understand the nature of their language repertoires better. The main finding is that being English in multilingual South Africa means to be at least bilingual with a multilingual mindset. English home language repertoires in South Africa therefore differ from English home language repertoires in Inner Circle contexts like the USA and Australia; and from Outer Circle contexts like Kenya.