Windhoek as a Meeting Place of Namibian Voices: Rural to Urban Migration Shaping the Multilingual Profile of the Capital City

In Sociolinguistics, it has long been acknowledged that in individual language repertoires, multilingualism, more than monolingualism, is the norm. Particularly, urban spaces are identified as a crossroads where multilingualism within communities is increasing due to various patterns of human mobility. This chapter refers to a study that draws on recently collected data that demonstrates the kind of urban multilingualism currently being shaped in Windhoek. Namibian citizens relatively recently relocated from rural areas to settle in informal housing areas around the capital city, so-called ‘internal migrants’, were approached. Questionnaires circulated among 377 adults of Namibian nationality gave an impression of how speakers integrate linguistic insights and experiences of self and others in using the resources they bring from the rural areas while adapting to accommodate features of the urban settlement. We consider Windhoek as a multilingual African city in which diversity is uncontested, even as this is hardly recognized in the country’s language policy. Our theoretical framework builds on Pennycook and Otsuji (Metrolingualism: Language in the city. Routledge, 2015) and Smakman and Heinrich (Urban sociolinguistics: The city as a linguistic process and experience. Routledge, 2018), whose work identifies contemporary patterns of urban multilingualism in well-resourced cities such as Tokyo and Bangladesh. In all, the findings demonstrate that speakers, in attempts to carve out a living, extend their language repertoires in novel ways to bridge the ‘language divide’ as they form new socio-economic partnerships.