About Per Linguam

Per Linguam: A Journal of Language Learning

Overview: a South African journal about how languages are learned and taught

Per Linguam is a peer-reviewed, accredited academic journal published by Stellenbosch University in South Africa and managed by the Department of Curriculum Studies in the university's Faculty of Education. That institutional home matters for reading the journal correctly. This is not a general linguistics title that occasionally touches on classrooms, and it is not a practitioner magazine that occasionally prints research. Its official focus combines language learning and teaching, educational linguistics and multilingual education, and it adds a further, distinctive angle: language learning issues viewed from an educational psychology perspective. A manuscript can therefore be linguistic, pedagogical and psychological at once, provided the educational question stays central.

The journal welcomes previously unpublished work for teachers, researchers, academics, language practitioners and anyone involved in language learning and teaching. Its author guidelines narrow that welcome in an important way. Per Linguam accepts articles that are data-driven, using qualitative and quantitative analytical tools. It will also consider conceptual articles, but only when they rest on the analysis of documents such as curricula and policies. Literature surveys and purely argumentative articles are explicitly excluded. Readers who understand that filter understand most of the journal: the typical Per Linguam article reports evidence — classroom data, learner data, test data, interview or observation material, or a systematic reading of policy and curriculum documents — rather than opinion about language education.

South Africa gives that evidence a particular setting. Classrooms there routinely work across several languages, national policy has long recognised eleven official languages, and questions about the language of instruction, reading development, assessment and teacher preparation are practical as well as scholarly. Per Linguam's multilingual-education focus, its Afrikaans as well as English publication languages, and its Department of Curriculum Studies home all place it inside that setting. At the same time, the questions it publishes on — second-language learning, literacy, language testing, curriculum and multilingual pedagogy — travel well beyond one country, which is why the journal is read and cited internationally. This profile separates what the journal itself states, what DOAJ records, what OpenAlex counts and what secondary ranking services report, so that each figure can be judged on its own basis.

History and identity

DOAJ records the journal's open-access history as beginning in 1985 (its oa_start field), and secondary services likewise describe a journal operating since 1985. The print ISSN 0259-2312 belongs to that long print history, while the online ISSN 2224-0012 identifies the electronic edition readers now use at perlinguam.journals.ac.za, hosted on the Stellenbosch journal platform. The saved Journals World record listed publication coverage of 2020–2025; that span should not be mistaken for the journal's lifespan. It reflects a coverage window in the data from which the short record was built, whereas the journal's own platform and DOAJ entry document a title of much longer standing.

Older directory and aggregator entries sometimes attach the journal to other Stellenbosch units, including general linguistics and didactics. Such names reflect earlier homes and older cataloguing. The journal's current About page is the authoritative statement for this profile: published by the University of Stellenbosch and managed by the Department of Curriculum Studies in the Faculty of Education. The stored Journals World record, by contrast, shows the publisher only as the number 7342, a garbled numeric value rather than a publisher name; the correct publisher, on the journal's own evidence, is Stellenbosch University. Authors should always work from the current journal site rather than from an old directory line when they need the editorial address or the responsible department.

The bilingual character is part of the identity, not a decoration. DOAJ records the publication languages as English (EN) and Afrikaans (AF), and DOAJ's subject coding places the journal in Language and Literature, with a further African languages and literature classification. That combination — an education-faculty journal, publishing in English and Afrikaans, classified partly under African languages — is unusual internationally and helps explain the journal's citation pattern: a specialised readership, deep engagement within language education, and a body of work that is often highly relevant to practitioners even where citation counts stay modest.

Scope in depth: what Per Linguam actually publishes

Language learning and teaching is the core. Articles examine how additional languages are acquired and taught, what happens in classrooms, how teachers plan and assess, and how learners develop proficiency over time. Because the journal insists on data, these articles usually present a defined group of learners or teachers, instruments that other researchers can inspect, and findings tied to that evidence. Work on reading and literacy development fits naturally here, as does work on language testing and placement, academic literacy at school and university, and the transition between phases of schooling.

Educational linguistics and multilingual education form the second strand. South African schooling raises concrete versions of general questions: in which language should early reading be taught, how should teachers work with learners whose home language differs from the language of instruction, how does translanguaging operate in real lessons, and how do curriculum documents handle multilingual classrooms? Per Linguam publishes research on exactly those mechanics. Its guidelines mention curricula and policies as legitimate material for conceptual work, so a careful document analysis of a language-in-education policy is in scope in a way that a general essay about multilingualism would not be.

The educational psychology perspective is the third strand and the one most often missed by authors who submit purely descriptive linguistics. Motivation, cognition, language aptitude, anxiety, identity and the psychology of reading and assessment all fall within the journal's stated view of language learning issues. OpenAlex's topic mapping for the source reflects the same blend: its leading topics include English as a foreign or second language teaching and learning, multilingual education and policy, second-language learning and teaching, reading and literacy development, and linguistic and sociocultural studies. Topic maps are algorithmic and are offered here only as a corroborating picture of the published mix, not as an editorial statement.

Two exclusions deserve emphasis because they shape editorial screening before peer review. Literature surveys are not considered, and purely argumentative articles are not considered. A strong Per Linguam submission therefore states a research problem, describes data and method in enough detail for the analysis to be checked, presents findings, and discusses what those findings mean for teaching, learning, curriculum or policy. A manuscript that mainly summarises other people's studies, however competently, is likely to be returned at the editorial assessment stage.

Peer review, ethics and editorial practice

All accepted submissions are double-blind peer reviewed, in the journal's wording, and research and review articles are subject to peer review. Manuscripts first undergo an editorial assessment for compliance and suitability; only suitable manuscripts move to reviewers. Potential reviewers receive an invitation containing the abstract and the reviewer guidelines, and access to the manuscript follows only after they accept. The journal states that reviewers should have expertise in the topic, should write collegially, should identify strengths as well as weaknesses, and should focus on the content rather than on the authors. The author guidelines add that contributions are evaluated by at least two referees and that the editor reserves the final decision.

Ethics provisions are unusually detailed for a journal of this size. Per Linguam states that it adheres to the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) Code of Best Practice in Scholarly Journal Publishing, Editing and Peer Review, and it publishes a full publication-ethics and malpractice statement. Authors must list references used, acknowledge financial support, confirm originality, confirm that data are real and verifiable, and accept exclusive publication: an article published elsewhere, or simultaneously submitted elsewhere, breaches the stated rules. Retraction guidance is explicit — seriously flawed and unreliable articles and redundant articles are retracted, authorship changes and minor errors are corrected online instead, and retraction notices must state the reason and mark the article in all electronic versions.

For authors, the practical ethics points are concrete. Ethical clearance statements must appear where methodology is discussed, naming the parties consulted for clearance; where that detail would identify the authors during blind review, a holding statement is used and the detail is added on acceptance. Instruments used in qualitative work, such as interview and observation schedules, and any survey used, should be included as addenda. These are not stylistic preferences. They are the journal's mechanism for making data-driven claims auditable, and a submission that omits them starts at a disadvantage.

Open access, fees, licensing and preservation

Per Linguam provides immediate open access on the principle, stated in its policy, that making research freely available supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Content is freely available without charge to the user or the user's institution, and users may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search and link to full texts, or use them for other lawful purposes, without prior permission, in line with the Budapest open-access definition the journal cites. DOAJ records the licence as CC BY-NC-ND and records that authors retain copyright. The journal's own submission guidance draws a related distinction: copyright in each article lies with its author or authors, and copyright in the journal lies with Per Linguam. Readers reusing material should still check the licence statement on the individual article, because the licence, not the journal-level summary, governs a specific reuse.

Open access here does not mean cost-free publishing. The journal charges page fees of R250 per page and states that it does not charge submission fees. It also tells authors the expected scale of a contribution: the average length of articles in printed issues varies between 15 and 20 pages, approximately 7,000 words. DOAJ independently records a charge of 250 in South African rand for the journal and a publication time of six weeks; the journal's own page-fee statement is the figure authors should budget from, since a per-page fee produces a total that depends on the typeset length of the accepted article. Whether any waiver applies to a particular author is not published in the material consulted for this profile and should be asked of the editorial office directly rather than assumed.

Digital preservation is in transition. The journal states that it is migrating from the Stellenbosch University preservation platform to the PKP Preservation Network platform. That single sentence is worth preserving in a profile because it tells librarians the direction of travel without overstating completion: the journal describes the migration as in process. DOAJ's record, last fully reviewed earlier, shows no preservation service flagged, which is consistent with a migration still underway rather than evidence that no preservation exists. Authors who need a definitive preservation statement for a funder should request it from the journal at the time of submission.

Metrics and indexing: reading the numbers carefully

Three different numbers are in circulation for this journal, and they answer three different questions. The saved Journals World record gave an h-index of 5. Secondary ranking services built on Scopus data report the same small figure, with a recent SCImago Journal Rank around 0.15 and quartile placement in the lower quartiles for its categories. Those are Scopus-based views: they count citations inside the Scopus corpus, over the windows those services use, for the coverage those services carry.

OpenAlex counts differently, and the figures used in this profile come from a direct fetch of the OpenAlex source record for these ISSNs, not from a summary. OpenAlex source S29385931, verified directly, records 535 works and 4,079 citations, an OpenAlex h-index of 28 and an i10-index of 96, with a two-year mean citedness of about 0.61. Its recent counts by year show, for example, 15 works in 2024 and 8 works in 2025, all counted as open access. A larger work set, a longer backfile and a broader citation graph produce a larger h-index than the Scopus-based figure. Neither number is a fabrication and neither should be substituted for the other: a promotion committee asking about Scopus standing needs the Scopus-derived figure, while a reader mapping the journal's total scholarly footprint can use the OpenAlex figure, labelled as OpenAlex.

DOAJ listing is verified, not inferred. Searching the DOAJ search API for each ISSN in this batch returned exactly one record — Per Linguam : A Journal of Language Learning, publisher Stellenbosch University, country ZA — for both the print and the online ISSN. DOAJ also records DOI as the persistent identifier scheme, keywords covering language learning, applied linguistics, multilingualism and educational psychology, and double anonymous peer review. Indexing claims beyond DOAJ and the Scopus-based services should be checked against the journal's own platform at the date of use, because index coverage changes and because aggregator pages frequently repeat each other's lists without a fresh check.

A final caution concerns quartiles. The short saved record labelled the journal Q3 without naming a category or year. Quartiles are category- and year-specific in Scopus-based rankings, and a journal can sit in different quartiles in different categories in the same year. This profile therefore does not promote a single quartile as a permanent property of Per Linguam. Readers who need a quartile should take it, with category and year named, from SCImago or Scopus at the time they cite it.

Submitting: the practical checklist the journal itself sets

• Length: preferably not more than 7,000 words excluding bibliographic details; the journal notes typical published articles of 15–20 pages
• Abstract: not more than 200 words, covering context, the research undertaken and main findings, with no references or abbreviations; add SDG codes in a separate paragraph after the abstract
• Evidence: data-driven analysis, or conceptual work based on documents such as curricula and policies; literature surveys and purely argumentative pieces are excluded
• Review readiness: remove author identification from the text and from the reference list for blind review, replacing names with Author (date) forms
• References: Harvard style; cite originals only, with no secondary citations; include page numbers for paraphrases as well as quotations; at least half of the references should be from the previous five years
• Apparatus: end notes numbered serially, data instruments and surveys as numbered addenda, and an ethical clearance statement in the methodology discussion
• Fees: no submission fee; page fees of R250 per page apply
• AI tools: use must be disclosed and cited as the guidelines direct; only humans can be authors, and authors take sole responsibility for authenticity

Formatting is specified in unusual detail — Times New Roman, main text at 12 point with titles at 14 point, 1.5 spacing, justified margins of 2.5 cm, a defined heading hierarchy with no sub-headings beyond the third level, double quotation marks, and acronyms used sparingly after a full first reference. None of this is difficult, but all of it is checkable at the editorial assessment stage, and the journal states plainly that manuscripts first undergo assessment for compliance and suitability. A careful author treats the style sheet as part of the submission, not as a production problem to be fixed later.

Correspondence other than the online submission goes to the editor at the journal's Stellenbosch address given on its submissions page. Authors based at Stellenbosch should also note the journal's ORCID note: the journal platform could not read ORCID iDs at registration, so the journal directs its own university's researchers to arrange for the identifier to be added through the library route it describes. That is a local platform detail, but it illustrates a general lesson of this profile — the most reliable instructions for this journal are the ones on its own site, which are specific, current and occasionally different from what generic directories say.

Who should read and cite Per Linguam

For researchers, the journal is a focused source on language classrooms in multilingual settings: early literacy, language of instruction, teacher knowledge, assessment and academic literacy are recurring concerns, treated with classroom-level evidence. For teachers and teacher educators, its value lies in the same data-driven habit: articles tend to show instruments, learner work or observed lessons, which makes their claims easier to test against local practice than a purely theoretical treatment would be. For policy readers, the document-based conceptual articles and the curriculum studies offer a route into how South African language-in-education policy operates in practice.

Citing the journal well means citing the individual article, with its DOI where one is given, and not treating the journal's modest Scopus-derived rank as a judgement on a specific paper. Specialised journals in education often carry work whose importance is local and practical first and citational second. Per Linguam's long history, university publisher, stated ethics code, double-blind review and verified DOAJ listing make it a legitimate scholarly venue; its numbers, read carefully and attributed to the database that produced them, describe a small, durable, specialised journal rather than a high-volume international title.

Verification notes and limits of this profile

The identity, scope, review process, fees, ethics statement and author requirements above are taken from the journal's own site at perlinguam.journals.ac.za. DOAJ facts — listing, licence, languages, publisher, country, DOI scheme, keywords and the 1985 open-access start — come from the DOAJ search API response retrieved for both ISSNs during this batch. OpenAlex figures come from a direct fetch of source S29385931 and agree with the ISSN lookup for the same record. Figures described as Scopus-based or SCImago-derived are attributed to those secondary services and are not presented as journal-stated facts. An impact factor in the Journal Citation Reports sense is not published in the sources consulted for this profile, and no such figure is claimed here. Acceptance rate and median time to first decision, beyond the DOAJ-recorded six-week publication time, are not publicly disclosed in the sources consulted and are not estimated here.