The advent of democracy in 1994 in South Africa, brought about a major change in the country’s linguistic landscape. For the first time in the history of the country, multilingualism was constitutionally recognised and nine of the country’s indigenous languages were granted official status. This constitutional change had major implications for the education sector. It prompted a change in the language policies in the education system of the country. The Department of Higher Education (DHET) promulgated the Language Policy for Higher Education (LPHE) in 2002. Among other things, this policy required Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to adopt and implement strategies to enact multilingualism by promoting the use of the indigenous African languages in the various HEIs in the country. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a review of the research that has been done in relation to promoting multilingualism as mandated by the policy. A bibliometric method of review was used to conduct the study to determine the research trends on multilingualism in higher education in South Africa. The review shows that research into multilingualism has grown since the adoption of the LPHE, with most research initially focused on attitudes towards multilingualism and a subsequent shift to research that focuses on multilingual approaches that can be considered for South Africa’s multilingual higher education student population.

Keywords: Higher education, language policy, multilingualism, multilingual teaching, South Africa.