Professor Rajend Mesthrie FBA
- Fellow type
- International Fellow
- Year elected
- 2025
- Honours
- FBA
- Subjects
- Linguistics
- Sections
- Linguistics and Philology
- Website
- https://rajendmesthrie.com/
Summary
Rajend Mesthrie was born in Umkomaas, South Africa in 1954 and attended small rural and high schools there. He thereafter attended the University of Durban-Westville (UDW), gaining a degree in Mathematics, English and Education.
His first introduction to Linguistics came in the English curriculum, igniting a life-long interest in the study of language, which he combined with the logic and rigour of Mathematics and the pastoral care of Education.
He read for an Honours degree in English Language at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and subsequently completed a Master’s degree in Linguistics at the University of Texas (Austin) and a PhD thesis at UCT. The latter was published as 'Language in Indenture' and remains in print today.
Mesthrie was a lecturer in English language at UDW (1979-1985), thereafter a lecturer and later head of the Linguistics Section at the University of Cape Town (1998 – 2009), where he subsequently held a National Research Foundation research chair in Migration, Language, and Social Change.
He was President of the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa (2002-2009) and of the International Congress of Linguists (2013-2018). Several of his students went on to fill senior positions at South African universities and abroad.
Mesthrie has published extensively on the socio-historical linguistics of Indian languages, African languages and English and Afrikaans in South Africa. At the same time his work on English as a global language and the sociolinguistics of Language Contact and Variation is widely recognised internationally.
Mesthrie has been active as an editor, in respect of journals, books, handbooks, encyclopaedias and book series (e.g. Cambridge Elements in Sociolinguistics). He is a past co-editor of 'English Today' (2008-2012).
A Stanford-Scopus survey of 2022 placed him in the top 2% of all researchers and first in Africa in the area of Language-Linguistics-Literature. He was awarded honorary life memberships with the Linguistics Society of South Africa and America.