This book would be interesting to those who study different varieties of English by means of spoken corpora for quantitative analyses and corpus comparisons. In contrast to traditional methods such as language tests, questionnaires, and interviews, this study offers a spoken corpus for a comprehensive overview of what Xhosa English speakers sound like. Specifically, it aims to provide “evidence of systematicity and relative frequencies in the grammar and the lexicon” (p. 33). The transcribed corpus is available at www.ru.ac.za/corpus, and the recordings are available from the author on request (v.deklerk@ru.ac.za).
De Klerk begins by reviewing the history of English usage in South Africa. She identifies the problem of how Xhosa English speakers should be defined according to Kachru’s multiple paradigm framework of world Englishes. Although English is used generally as a second language in cross-tribe interactions among Black people from different provinces, it is hardly ever used outside of school by Xhosa speakers of the Eastern Cape. English does not pervade in the speakers’ daily lives, and its common usage is found only in formal public contexts. Accordingly, it functions more often as a variety of English in the expanding circle than as one in the outer circle.
To collect spontaneous ways of speaking, De Klerk let her informants discuss any topic with which they felt comfortable. She comments that business transactions are inappropriate for spoken data collection because “many day-to-day transactions can be very quick and even wordless” (p. 31). She also explains that broadcast data are not collected in her corpus because media English is often produced after numerous rehearsals.
As long-term residents of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, the 317 Xhosa English speakers who participated in the study represent their ethnic speech community. De Klerk remarks that because Xhosa speakers are the second largest group of tribal language speakers among the nine indigenous languages in the country (second in number to Zulu and followed by Afrikaans), it is worth describing the linguistic features of Xhosa English as an important subvariety of BSAE. The Xhosa English corpus is composed of 262 samples of unscripted dialogue, containing 541,174 words.
This study, albeit small-scale in the number of the speakers, provides empirical evidence to supplement previous research based on anecdotal remarks or limited surveys. In addition, De Klerk also employs the corpus to analyze topic choices, lexical characteristics, the role of APPRAISAL resources in discussing AIDS, formulaic expressions, code-switching between Xhosa and English, the discourse markers actually and well, and the use of intensifiers. Finally, De Klerk turns to the psycholinguistic theme of the link between language use and identity, exploring the extent to which Xhosa English speakers would like to sound like Xhosas and display shared linguistic traits consciously or unconsciously. She suggests that inter-variety comparisons will enable teachers not only to “unteach” those deviant structures in the use of English for international communication, but also to teach those distinctive features that are also typical of other English varieties.
This study does not address the Xhosa English learners’ speech continuum. The study might also be extended in the future to explore the linguistic features of English sociolects used by Xhosa English speakers from other sociolinguistic backgrounds.
