Southernizing Multilingualism: Rethinking Language, Philosophy, and Pedagogy in Ghanaian Classrooms

open_access
Open Access
Author:
Dartey, Edwin
Graduate Program:
Applied Linguistics
Degree:
Doctor of Philosophy
Document Type:
Dissertation
Date of Defense:
May 28, 2026
Committee Members:
Suresh Canagarajah, Major Field Member
Sinfree Makoni, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Deryn Verity, Major Field Member
Kidane Mengisteab, Outside Unit & Field Member
Tommaso Milani, Program Head/Chair
Keywords:
Southern multilingualism
Translanguaging
Language-in-education policy
Multilingual education
Early-exit transitional bilingual education
Afro-communitarianism
Personhood
Fanon’s colonial subjectivity and psychopolitics of language
Linguistic repertoire
Classroom discourse
Abstract:
This study examines multilingual communication practices in Ghanaian primary school classrooms to rethink the “language problem” in African education as a fundamentally ideological issue rather than technical or policy driven one. It is situated within a Southernizing multilingualism framework that challenges dominant assumptions of language as a neutral medium of instruction and instead conceptualizes it as a socially and historically embedded practice through which knowledge, identity, personhood, and meaning are produced. Drawing on Southern epistemologies, African philosophical traditions of personhood, and Fanon’s account of colonial subjectivity and the psychopolitics of language, the study approaches classroom language practices as both a relational practice of knowledge construction and a site shaped by enduring linguistic and epistemic inequalities. Within this framework, this research examines how multilingual practices are enacted in primary classrooms and how they are shaped by teachers’ beliefs, ideologies, and broader socio-institutional contexts. A qualitative case study design was employed across selected public and private primary schools in Ghana. Data were generated through classroom observations, semi-structured interviews with teachers and school officials, and field notes to examine the relationship between language ideology and classroom practice. The findings reveal a persistent ideological hierarchy in which English is associated with academic legitimacy, mobility, and future-oriented aspiration, while indigenous languages such as Twi are linked to identity, relationality, and present-oriented social life. However, this hierarchy is unsettled in practice. Classroom interaction demonstrates that teaching and learning depend on continuous multilingual mediation, with teachers and students drawing on multiple linguistic resources to support comprehension, participation, and knowledge construction. This produces a structural tension between languages valued for institutional recognition and those required for epistemic access, such that English dominance is sustained symbolically but depends in practice on the multilingual resources it marginalizes. The study advances a relational and hybrid model of classroom multilingualism, which conceptualizes language use as a recursive system in which ideology, interaction, and epistemic practice are mutually constituted. From this perspective, the privileging of English as a language of academic legitimacy is not a fixed ideological condition but one that is continuously produced and reworked through classroom interaction. This shift in perspective reconceptualizes multilingual classrooms as stable yet internally dynamic systems in which linguistic authority, pedagogical necessity, and epistemic access are continuously negotiated. Within this reconceptualization, multilingualism emerges as both enabling and constrained: enabling because it sustains learning in practice and constrained because it remains subordinated to English within institutional regimes of validation and aspiration. On this basis, this study develops Southernizing multilingualism as an analytical framework that recenters ideology, epistemology, and lived practice in the study of language in education. In doing so, it calls for a shift beyond implementation-focused approaches toward a rethinking of how language, knowledge, and legitimacy are conceptualized in African education and, more broadly, in multilingual and culturally diverse educational contexts.