LINGUISTIC JUSTICE AND HIGHER EDUCATION FUTURES: LEVERAGING THE DISCIPLINARY LITERACIES FRAMEWORK TO RE-IMAGINE INSTRUCTIONAL COMMUNICATION IN SOUTH AFRICAN HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract

Language remains a central site of struggle in South African higher education. Despite progressive constitutional and policy commitments to multilingualism, African languages are largely excluded from formal teaching and learning, relegated instead to symbolic or supplementary roles while English and Afrikaans continue to dominate as media of instruction. This exclusion creates a persistent paradox: while graduates must engage professionally and socially through African languages in workplaces, communities, and civic life, their academic training equips them primarily in colonial languages. This paper offers a conceptual and theoretical analysis of this paradox by applying Airey’s Disciplinary Literacies Discussion Matrix (DLDM) to interrogate this persistent disjuncture between the language of academic training and the linguistic demands of professional and societal participation. The DLDM, which highlights the communicative demands of disciplines across three sites - the academy, the workplace, and society - and exposes the epistemic injustices that arise when instruction is misaligned with these linguistic realities is used as a heuristic framework to examine how communicative demands across disciplinary sites shape linguistic inclusion and exclusion. Drawing from Southern theory (Connell, 2007) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s (1986) critique of colonial-language dominance, the paper argues that the marginalisation of African languages sustains epistemic inequality and undermines higher education’s social justice mandate. In response, the paper advances a multilingual pedagogical framework that embeds African languages into disciplinary teaching through translanguaging practices, curriculum redesign, and digital mediation. Such reform goes beyond additive bilingualism by positioning African languages as central to knowledge creation, professional competence, and epistemic sovereignty. The paper offers a novel lens for reimagining instructional communication as a site of transformation. It demonstrates how disciplinary literacies can be reconfigured to affirm African languages as vital infrastructures for higher education futures.