Gerald Stell’s Namibian English in its Multilingual Environment is an important and wide-ranging study of the linguistic ecology of Namibia, with English as a key focus. The book distinguishes itself from similar publications on national varieties of English through its consistent multilingual focus and offers parallel investigations of other languages at various points. It also distinguishes itself from many similar investigations through the much more systematic variationist perspective, drawing on insights from Labovian, First-Wave sociolinguistics, but also aspects of Second- and Third-Wave sociolinguistics.

The Dynamics of English in Namibia: Perspectives on an Emerging Variety (Schröder Reference Schröder2021) offered the first book-length treatment of English in Namibia, including one chapter contributed by Stell (Reference Stell and Schröder2021). In the manner of edited volumes, it offered a range of partially independent studies, focussing on a wider range of phenomena than Stell, but could not aim for the same degree of coherence. Stell steers clear of the applied topics such as English in healthcare or broadcasting and does not address literature in Namibian English. However, his selection of topics is by itself wide-ranging for a single-authored study, from the historical foundations (Chapter 1), to attitudes and uses of language (Chapters 2 and 3), to language use, including language mixing (Chapter 4), pronunciation (Chapter 5) and grammar (Chapter 6). The coherence is especially clear in Chapter 7 on ways of understanding Namibian English in relation to world Englishes more generally, where the various chapters in the book are integrated into a comprehensive account of Namibian English, which forms the basis for a critique of perspective advanced in the final chapter of Schröder (Reference Schröder2021), “The dynamics English in Namibia: A World Englishes Perspective” (Schneider and Schröder Reference Schneider, Schröder and Schröder2021), to which this review will return later.

The book starts with an unnumbered Introduction, where general theoretical concerns and relevant models of Englishes are presented, some from within the broader world Englishes camp, such as Schneider’s Dynamic Model of Postcolonial Englishes (Reference Schneider2007), and some from other perspectives, such as Trudgill’s (Reference Trudgill2004) model of new-variety development. Stell proceeds to sketch in some detail the sociohistorical background to Namibia’s language ecology in Chapter 1.

Chapters 2 and 3 offer a complementary etic and emic perspective on English and perceived Namibian language dynamics. Chapter 2 draws from survey data on the knowledge of languages, self-identification with languages, perceived competence, and contexts of use of 305 participants, who were senior secondary school or university students in the capital, Windhoek. The answers provide a picture of how this group of participants view their own languages and usage, together with perspectives on their normative orientations for the languages that they claim to speak. The written questionnaire is also complemented by follow-up interviews with a sample of 104 people, from the same settings as the questionnaire, plus interviews with secondary school students in two other settings underrepresented in the Windhoek sample. The interview data are presented with the questionnaire data as ways to understand some of the quantitative patterns better. Among the findings are that Black Namibians generally do not speak one another’s language but mainly add English and Afrikaans to their repertoires, while Afrikaans speakers only add English. Language itself is less salient to their identities for Coloured Afrikaans speakers and Ovambos, while these two groups, together with White Afrikaans speakers show a stronger Namibian identity, tied to more favourable attitudes towards English.

The complementary emic perspective is presented in Chapter 3, based on a map-drawing task for each language (indigenous, Afrikaans and/or English), in conjunction with a verbal-guise experiment with follow-up focus groups. The key questions in the map-drawing tasks prompted participants to indicate on the map where in the country the languages are spoken and if it contains varieties, where these varieties are spoken. Participants were also requested to label the varieties. Of particular interest was the attestation of mixing practices, attested with Oshiwambo as basis in the North, and with Afrikaans (Kasietaal) or English (Namlish) in Windhoek and the South. Associations with gender (men using more Afrikaans, women more English) and education (good English) also emerged. The verbal-guise data further point to the prestige of the English of White and Coloured Afrikaans speakers, with especially Coloured English valued among speakers of indigenous languages. The notion of a coconut, too much crossing into non-black varieties, also emerged as an attitudinal constraint on the amount of Coloured-sounding that is tolerated among Black users of English.

Chapters 4 to 6 present investigations into language use, maintaining the multilingual approach within which English finds a place. Language choice and use patterns are investigated in Chapter 4, where participants engage in conversations with fellow Namibians for about an hour. One set of conversations involved intra-ethnic interactions, which left participants the option of using their shared common language. Most recordings were made in Windhoek, where the Herero, Damara, Nama, Coloured and White Afrikaans groups conducted most of their conversations in their respective home languages. The Northern Ovambo group recorded in Windhoek also conducted their conversation in their common home language for slightly more than half the time, although slightly less than half the conversation took place in English. The Southern Ovambo group conducted their conversation mainly in English and Afrikaans, slightly more and less than half of all lexemes respectively. A second set of recordings were made in Oshakati (in the North of the country), featuring additional Northern Ovambo participants, who conducted their conversations in different dialects of Oshiwambo, with very limited use of English (less than 5% of all lexemes for most participants) and even less of Afrikaans (less than 1% for most). In inter-ethnic contexts, the picture changes, and English and Afrikaans became the main lingua franca options, with almost no use of lexemes from the indigenous languages, except in conversations between Northern and Southern Ovambos, where Oshiwambo was used for a quarter of the lexemes, and in conversations between Nama and Damara speakers, who relied on their closely related home languages for up to 90% of all lexemes. Across all inter-ethnic parings, women tended to use relatively more English than men, and men conversely more Afrikaans. The chapter explores grammatical types of code-switching, discourse markers and functions of code-switching at a more qualitative level, while reporting broad quantitative generalisations too. A very salient generalisation emerges that discourse markers associated with Coloured Afrikaans were widely used in codeswitching with English by all but the White Afrikaans speakers, which Stell interprets as one of the most salient pan-Namibian markers of identity for all other Namibians.

The vowels of Namibian languages are the focus of Chapter 5. Through an acoustic analysis of vowels in indigenous languages, Afrikaans and English, the chapter explores how Namibians compare to one another and how their vowels compare to vowels in South African English and Afrikaans. A key finding is a clear split, in English and Afrikaans, of White Namibians and the others. Coloured Namibians seem to be an important target for Black Namibians, in English and Afrikaans. Men show deeper influence of Afrikaans on their pronunciation of English than women, corroborating findings from Chapter 4. Strong similarities emerge to South African English, and in particular, the KIT-split is not only attested among native speakers of Afrikaans, but also to various degrees among speakers of the other Namibian languages.

Chapter 6 turns to a number of grammatical properties of Namibian languages – tense-aspect combinations and left-dislocation constructions with an anaphoric pronoun. The data for tense-aspect patterns are from a translation exercise, in which sentence prompts in speakers’ home languages are translated into English, and where sufficient competence exists for L2 speakers of Afrikaans, also into Afrikaans. In addition, naturalistic data from the earlier interviews are analysed to confirm the experimental data and are also analysed to determine the use of anaphoric pronouns with left dislocation. Findings support substratal influence to the extent that Afrikaans speakers mark imperfectives less often than speakers of Bantu and Khoekhoegowab when translating into English, a finding also confirmed by the naturalistic data. Black women show lower frequencies of imperfective use than men, which points to a measure of convergence with the usage of Afrikaans speakers. Substratal influence is also observed for speakers of Bantu languages who use more anaphoric pronouns. However, speakers of Damara, whose home language does not have a corresponding structure that would support left dislocation, do show more extensive attestation of this feature in their English, indicating possible convergence on the Oshiwambo speakers. They do not show similar left dislocation patterns in their Afrikaans, though, which is further support for the convergence on the dominant group of Black users of Namibian English, which Stell attributes to face-to-face accommodation.

The theoretical implications of the findings for the study of sociolinguistic variation in postcolonial contexts and for the interpretation of Namibian English in the broader world Englishes framework, in particular Schneider’s Dynamic Model, are set out in Chapter 7. As far as sociolinguistic analyses of variation are concerned, Stell shows the importance of gender and education as important variables within the Namibian linguistic ecology. Women use English more extensively and men use Afrikaans more often. Women approximate prestige norms for English more clearly, and men target the solidarity norms, associated with Afrikaans and the use of Afrikaans elements in English. There is also clear evidence of a difference between students who attend private and government schools in Windhoek. A surprising contrast, at least from the perspective of what happens in neighbouring South Africa (as set out by Mesthrie Reference Mesthrie2017), is that the English of Coloured Afrikaans speakers is the target for approximation by upwardly mobile Black Namibians, and not White Afrikaans speakers. Stell also identifies limits to classical Labovian first-wave sociolinguistics for the Namibian context, including the impossibility of conducting apparent-time studies of change in progress. This is the consequence of the absence of older cohorts of English speakers among Black Namibians, partly for historical reasons of access to education, and partly because older residents of Windhoek return to their rural areas of origin when they retire, leaving a gap in the presence of speakers of English across the age spectrum. He turns to insights from second- and third-wave sociolinguistics by examining agency, self-styling of categories and the movement between different positions in societies, using language differently in different circumstances.

Stell revisits the position of Namibian English within the Dynamic model of Schneider (Reference Schneider2007), the topic of the final chapter by Schneider and Schröder (Reference Schneider, Schröder and Schröder2021) in Schröder (Reference Schröder2021). Stell notes that Namibian English has been treated as a unique case in the adoption of English despite its lack of British colonial history, a position that goes back to Buschfeld (Reference Buschfeld, Buschfeld, Thomas, Magnus and Alexander2014) and Schneider (Reference Schneider2014). Stell challenges the historical assumption that Namibia did not experience colonial transplantation of English. He highlights early influence of the British military occupation and administration before full control was taken over by the South African administration, as well as the history of (English-language) missionary education in Namibia since the end of the German period. English was retained as co-official language throughout the period of South African control, even if it was subordinated to Afrikaans since the middle of the 20^th century. In addition, he emphasises the importance of English in communication and education for SWAPO and those in exile during the liberation war. In that sense, the choice of English should not surprise, according to Stell, nor does it represent a discontinuity with historical precedent that has been building since the early 20^th century. He also challenges the evidence for some of the claims about Namibian English showing its independence from South African English, such as the NURSE-WORK split, first observed by Kautzsch and Schröder (Reference Kautzsch, Schröder, Ehland, Mindt and Tönnies2016), and taken further by Schröder et al. (Reference Schröder, Zähres, Kautzsch and Schröder2021). Crucial to the importance of this finding is that it has not been reported for any other variety of English and, therefore, constitutes evidence of Namibian uniqueness.

Unfortunately, Stell does not report acoustic analyses of the NURSE vowel in Chapter 5. However, the possibility that the NURSE-WORK split is largely allophonic variation and not something that is entirely new to Namibian English finds support in the acoustic analysis of Bekker (Reference Bekker2009) on South African English. Bekker (Reference Bekker2009, 380) notes that several instances of a retracted NURSE vowel are attested in the South African data, and specifically in the environment where it follows the /w/, as exemplified by the word WORK itself. He discards this as retraction under the influence of the phonetic environment, thus as allophonic variation and not something warranting a distinction of the kind that Kautzsch and Schröder (Reference Kautzsch, Schröder, Ehland, Mindt and Tönnies2016) draw. At any rate, the claim that such variation is unattested elsewhere is refuted by Bekker’s evidence.

Stell proceeds to argue that evidence can be found in the data on Namibia to support its placement in all of stages 2–5 of the Dynamic Model (Schneider Reference Schneider2007), with the phonetic evidence mainly pointing to stage 2, exonormative orientation towards South African English. He asks the question of whether the boundaries between ESL and EFL need to be blurred, and he segues from here to the more fundamental question of what it means to be an Outer Circle variety.

The remainder of Chapter 7 provides an outline of an alternative perspective on the idea of English as an Outer Circle variety. Stell outlines a set of assumptions about unique characteristics of Outer Circle varieties that draws together reference points about matters such as face-to-face accommodation across ethnic boundaries, overt and covert prestige, avoidance, hybridity and language mixing, and urban/rural contrasts. On this basis, he formulates four scenarios of what might happen. These scenarios are presented earlier in the book, and assessed against the data in the various chapters, but are fleshed out in more detail in Chapter 7. In the first scenario, an ethnolinguistic group with a history of socio-economic dominance will also be the sociolinguistically dominant one, towards whom other groups will orient. In the second scenario, an ethnolinguistic group that is demographically dominant would serve as target for others. Scenario 3 is where face-to-face accommodation drives mutual convergence, with multidirectional changes occurring, rather than a single target to which others accommodate. The final scenario is where English performs only limited lingua franca functions and other languages are preferred. Throughout the presentation of the scenarios, Stell notes how aspects of the Namibian context correspond to each of them, but no single scenario emerges as the dominant one. The scenarios are followed by an outline of the various role-players who hold the Namibian linguistic ecology in check, and how each one of them contributes to the ongoing change in languages and language choice.

Stell concludes the book with the assertion that Namibian English is not ‘a sort of UFO among all World Englishes’ (p. 387), an implicit, and sometimes in different formulation even an explicit claim made by others who are working on English in Namibia. He finds that the study of Namibian English offers insight into the implementation of a language policy and its linguistic consequences, urbanisation and desegregation in the postcolonial context, and multilingual practices.

Stell offers a provocative, theoretical picture in the final chapter, directly challenging an emerging consensus among a number of researchers working on English in Namibia. He makes a convincing argument for interpreting the evidence from Namibia as more consistently in line with what one expects of an Outer Circle setting, which should then find a place in the Dynamic Model without the kinds of unexpected characteristics attributed to it by the line of interpretation adopted by Buschfeld, Schneider and others. He makes profitable use of his findings to refine concepts about the Outer Circle, especially through the various possible scenarios that he outlines, with the underlying assumptions and the role of actors. The theoretical contribution aligns constructively with World Englishes scholarship, but the author could have related his ideas with Outer Circle concepts in more detail. The same could have been done with Trudgill’s proposal, despite obvious differences. Such an analysis would allow for a reinterpretation of Dynamic Model concepts based on the proposals in the final chapter, which would, in turn be an important next step in deepening our theoretical understanding.

Stell’s work has extra merit through its very consistent multilingual approach. He makes equally valuable descriptive and interpretative contributions to Afrikaans in Namibia in this book, an area to which he has made independent contributions in recent years, e.g. Stell (Reference Stell, Carstens and Bosman2024). At the same time, he offers various insights from the use of indigenous languages of Namibia, together with their phonetic and grammatical properties. Together with the consistent and critical engagement with sociolinguistic insights, the book offers a very fine example of how research into varieties of English should be undertaken in an integrated, non-isolationist fashion. Stell should be commended for the breadth and depth of his work, both descriptively and theoretically. Further theoretical dialogue should ensue from this publication, both insofar as Namibian English is concerned and in respect of the conceptualisation of the dynamics of non-native varieties and the agents involved.