Although English is one of South Africa’s eleven official languages, its hegemony is felt country-wide, especially in the education system, to the extent that none of the other official languages can match it. This chapter discusses some of the factors contributing to the reproduction of the dominance of English through English Medium Instruction (EMI) in South Africa, with the focus on the following: the legacy of apartheid language-in-education policies, especially the Bantu Education Act, which sought to deny Black students access to English and impose Afrikaans as the sole medium of instruction in Black schools; South Africa’s new language policy, which gives official recognition to eleven languages but has escape clauses covertly favoring English in the country’s educational system; and student protest movements, which simultaneously demand the fall of a colonial language (Afrikaans) and the continued rise of another (English) at the expense of the indigenous languages. The chapter discusses these factors in light of theoretical developments in critical linguistic theory and language economics. It explores ways in which the reproduction of the dominance of English through EMI can be approached to ensure that English and South Africa’s other official languages coexist, one not at the expense of but in addition to the others.

In this chapter, we review how economists and linguists have problematized the relationship between economy and language, focusing on their methodologies, theoretical toolboxes, and ideologies. One of the striking differences lies in the ways they conceptualize languages, viz., as strictly denotational for economists but both denotational and indexical for linguists. We show that by approaching them as abstract, asocial, ahistorical, and statistically measurable entities, economists treat languages as resources whose economic consequences for individuals or societies can simply be derived from their intrinsic nature. By contrast, examining languages as practices grounded in their sociohistorical ecologies, linguists have been more interested in the valuation of some languages as capitals that can outweigh others economically or symbolically. Overall, we highlight the interdisciplinary nature of “economy and language” as a research area, showing how complex it is and how productive it should be to build an intellectual bridge between the two disciplines.