I A framework for English in South Africa

In chapter 1, ‘English in South Africa: Contact and change’, Hickey sets the scene for the volume by introducing both the unique profile of SAfE ‘within the constellation of Southern Hemisphere Englishes’ (p. 6), and the expanding scholarship on its linguistic development and status. The chapter tracks the evolution and spread of the variety from its arrival in the late eighteenth century to modern times, pointing in particular to its increasing role in communication within the public domain. This story of SAfE takes place amidst the considerable political, social, educational and economic changes that have occurred over some 200 years. It is a story of remarkable diversity and contact scenarios between English and indigenous languages such as isiZulu and isiXhosa, as well as Afrikaans; the global orientation of more recent times is also seeing features of the broader anglophone world making an appearance in the youth languages of urban centres such as Johannesburg. As Hickey concludes, external factors, especially the fall-out of globalisation, ‘will determine the course of English in South Africa during the twenty-first century’ (p. 10).

Edgar Schneider's chapter, ‘South Africa in the linguistic modelling of World Englishes’, picks up the difficulty of modelling South Africa's complex linguistic situation within World Englishes theories, beginning with Barbara Strang's (Reference Strang1970) tripartite classification (her A, B, C types), Braj Kachru's (Reference Kachru, Quirk and Widdowson1985) ‘Three Circles’ model, as well as Görlach's (Reference Görlach1991) and McArthur's (Reference McArthur1998) ‘wheel models’ of World English. The foregrounding of extralinguistic factors in Schneider's own ‘Dynamic Model’ places the emphasis on individuals, their social identity and its linguistic expression, and this puts the theory in a better position to accommodate the complexity of South Africa's linguistic setting. Nonetheless, Schneider acknowledges the controversy of trying to fit this kind of complexity within one and the same model – in particular, given the lack of a single stable variety and the ‘co-existence of ENL usage and ESL forms, with actually at least two different groups of native speakers’. He concludes it is debatable whether these variety types can be accounted for in one and the same model (p. 26). The question he poses at the end is whether time will see the blurring of the ethnolinguistic divisions, and thus a decrease in the differences between the various dialects.

In chapter 3, ‘South African English, the Dynamic Model and the challenge of Afrikaans influence’, Ian Bekker continues the challenge of modelling SAfE. He critiques aspects of the models of new-dialect formation put forward by Trudgill and Schneider, focusing in particular on the sequence of five stages that characterises Schneider's (Reference Schneider2007) Dynamic Model (DM). His account shows that accommodating the development of SAfE within this model is complicated by the influence of Afrikaans: ‘On the one hand, its European origins meant that it played a direct role in the initial koinéisation process, thus challenging the phrasal logic of the DM. On the other hand, the rise of Afrikaner nationalism put into play divergent forces which subverted the convergence predicted by the DM’ (p. 46).

A very different approach is offered by Ronel Wasserman in chapter 4, ‘The historical development of South African English: Semantic features’. She continues the theme of Afrikaans influence but does so tracing the development of thirty-five semantic features of SAfE from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, specifically lexico-grammatical features such as modal verb must and discourse yes–no. Hers is a corpus-based approach that focuses specifically on shifts in the meaning of English words that are probably attributable to Afrikaans contact. This historical study highlights the interplay of contact-induced change and contact-induced grammaticalisation. And despite the difficulty of teasing apart the role that external and internal influences play in these kinds of change, Wasserman concludes that contact with Afrikaans is what has ‘unlocked and activated’ (p. 69) the extended uses of these English words.

‘Regionality in South African English’ is a multi-authored chapter that makes the case for regionality, specifically in the vowels of White SAfE. While earlier accounts viewed this variety as geographically undifferentiated, these authors, Deon du Plessis, Ian Bekker and Raymond Hickey, attribute renewed interest in geographical variation within this variety to the strong presence of regionality across the Coloured and Indian communities, as described by Mesthrie and his collaborators. This research (based on earlier work by du Plessis) sampled data from three cities (Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg), using Lass's earlier (Reference Lass and Ramsaran1990) account of the vowels of standard SAfE as a yardstick against which to compare and evaluate the variation. The authors uncover ‘a not inconsiderable degree of regionality’ (p. 98) in the realisations of vowels, and they predict that time will continue this trend, adding new regionally relevant dimensions to English in South Africa.

In the last chapter in this first section, ‘Does editing matter? Editorial work, endonormativity and convergence in written Englishes in South Africa’, Haidee Kotze continues the theme of variation but with a focus on written forms of English, specifically academic writing (dissertations, theses and journal articles written over the last decade). Her focus is on how editorial involvement reflects and affects endonormativity and convergence in the settler strand of White SAfE and the indigenous strand of Black SAfE. Presenting a corpus-based quantitative comparison of unedited and edited versions of these academic texts, Kotze examines sixty-seven linguistic features from Biber (Reference Biber1988) to pinpoint which features can predict whether a text belongs to the Black SAfE or White SAfE strand. Making a tentative comparison with published British English writing, she identifies downtoners and possibility modals (e.g. can, could, may, might) – ‘a first step’, as she describes it, towards ‘an understanding of how editing may reshape the two varieties in relation to each other’ (p. 109). The study finds some support for endonormativity, though she concludes ‘a kind of multiple and varied endonormativity at more local (rather than national) levels, and little evidence of convergence’ (p. 121).

II Sociolinguistics, globalisation and multilingualism

In chapter 7, ‘Language contact in Cape Town’, authors Tessa Dowling, Kay McCormick and Charlyn Dyers examine the language ecology in contemporary Cape Town. As an area that has long been the site of language contact, it is characterised by ‘a rich – and changing – social and linguistic diversity’, and one that highlights ‘the creative tension between what people do with their linguistic resources and what language policy directs them to do’ (p. 129). The multilingual practices uncovered by this research reveal that, despite the continued value placed on English, there are some domains where local indigenous languages and non-standard dialects are considered to be more suitable. Moreover, the authors note the expansion of translanguaging practices – from markers of shared identity between marginalised people to resources used to support language practices in the classroom. As they also observe, multilingual codes are now ‘widely enjoyed and exploited’ for their artistic possibilities; in the Cape Town hip-hop and rap scene, for example, ‘the more a performer can manipulate and combine languages, the greater his or her success is judged to be’ (p. 144).

In this next chapter, ‘Internal push, external pull: The reverse short front vowel shift in South African English’, Alida Chevalier documents the fascinating chain shift that is seeing the lowering (and sometimes retracting) of short front vowels in South Africa. While this shift is also attested in other English-speaking communities (e.g. in Ireland, Scotland and Australia), it reverses the tendency for short vowels to rise, a common British legacy associated with the ‘South African Chain Shift’, the fall-out of which is still evident in the speech of older white South Africans (a similar system is also present, and systematic, in New Zealand English). In documenting this ‘Reverse Vowel Shift’, Chevalier presents evidence for the lowering of the kit, dress and trap vowels, identifying the fronting of foot and the lowering of trap as the primary triggers. This reversal, she argues, has been caused by external influences coming from North America – the dominance of Hollywood and the virtual contact with English in America (especially Californian English), where vowel lowering has been attested for some time. As she notes, American accents appeal on a global scale ‘in a way which the older SAfE (and British) accents do not’ (p. 171). Evidence for this also comes from the rhoticity Chevalier has observed in the speech of some of her participants (especially in words such as bird and nurse).

In chapter 9, ‘Youth language in South Africa: The role of English in South African Tsotsitaals’, Heather Brookes examines the role of English in vernacular varieties known as tsotsitaals. These varieties, or performative registers, form part of the rich linguistic repertoires of male youths across South Africa, and have important social meanings and values to do with negotiating status and identity. They are varieties characterised by a slang lexicon that has been inserted into the grammar of one or several languages, combined with special rhetorical devices and paralinguistic features involving intonation and gesture. The chapter reviews the work of Raj Mesthrie on specifically English-based tsotsitaals (as opposed to those that use Afrikaans or Bantu as their syntactic base), and it examines Mesthrie's work from a social interactionist perspective. As the author notes, while tsotsitaals are the property of youth groups, occasionally a linguistic expression has a wider impact, escaping into the everyday informal language to become a general signal of someone who is ‘streetwise and urban’ (p. 193).

The next chapter, ‘Econo-language planning and transformation in South Africa: From localisation to globalisation’, moves to the challenges facing educators, policy makers and linguists involved in language policy and planning in South Africa. Russell Kaschula outlines ‘a mutually inclusive linguistic environment that can benefit growth in South Africa, rather than to beat the tired old drum of English versus African languages’ (p. 197). Specifically, the chapter advocates a multidimensional approach to language planning, one involving both a top-down and bottom-up perspective that incorporates the individual within the context of local and national economic growth. Specifically, what Kaschula has dubbed ‘econo-language planning’ is a technique that brings together language, identity and economic realities, and ‘takes cognisance of localisation (indigenous language and culture) in the face of globalisation’ (p. 200).

The last chapter in this section, ‘Multilingualism in South African education: A southern perspective’, continues the challenges presented by multilingualism but in the context of discussions around education. The authors, Kathleen Heugh and Christopher Stroud, examine the debates and developments in relation to multilingualism and multilingual education from the 1980s onwards, paying tribute to the long history of African expertise and contribution to this field. As they conclude, the narrative they present offers ‘a different vantage point from which to tell the story of English in South Africa’ (p. 231).

III Language interfaces

In the first chapter in this final section, ‘Present-day Afrikaans in contact with English’, Bertus van Rooy uses corpus evidence to evaluate examples of grammatical changes in Afrikaans that have been influenced by contact with English (in particular, complement clauses, demonstratives and the indefinite pronoun een ‘one’). He draws on a sample of different published and unpublished written works from the Afrikaans Historical Corpus (covering four decades: 1910s, 1940s, 1970s and 2000s), supplementing this with data from a 1970s corpus of spoken Afrikaans; examples of pre-twentieth-century data come from the handwritten letters from the Cape Language Archive (the Kappse Taalargief) from the 1830s. While van Rooy concludes that ‘[t]he influence of English on Afrikaans has been, and continues to be, pervasive’ (p. 261), most of the changes are probably the result of multiple origins, with both external and internal factors having a role to play. Moreover, as he points out, this multifaceted influence is mutual, with English taking on Afrikaans words and structures as well.

In chapter 13, ‘Shift varieties as a typological class? A consideration of South African Indian English’, Raymond Hickey focuses on South African Indian English (SAIE) to explore whether shift varieties are sufficiently structurally different (‘in kind, and not merely in degree’, p. 266) to be given the status of typological class. He identifies aspectual categories as key in this debate. Described as ‘frequently the most robust of the vernacular traits’ in new, focused varieties of the target language (p. 268), these distinctions are tellingly present in shift varieties – despite the general lack of overt grammatical expression in these varieties, and despite being absent from the input sources. However, Hickey leaves it up to individual scholars to decide whether the evidence he outlines is sufficient to label these contact varieties a typological class in their own right, and to determine what this labelling might ultimately provide in the way of insights into the linguistic behaviour of these varieties.

Chapter 14, ‘Language use and language shift in post-apartheid South Africa’, the authors Dorrit Posel and Jochen Zeller continue the topic of language shift. After reviewing qualitive and quantitative research on language shifts to English in South Africa, they go on to assess the evidence of a shift from Afrikaans to English by analysing the patterns and trends in first and second home language use gleaned from the three Population Censuses in the post-apartheid period (1996, 2001 and 2011). Notwithstanding the notorious inaccuracies of such data-collecting practices (especially in early times), they report the most telling national trend to be a dramatic increase in the use of English as a second home language (in 2011 almost 60 per cent). The increase in use of English as an L1, however, was modest (an increase from 9 to 10 per cent). They conclude that the growth in English use ‘derives far more from the widening of people's language repertoires to include English as a second language than from a shift to English as the first home language’ (p. 305). The decline nationally in the use of Afrikaans as L1 has been tiny, and, as they report, specific to Coloured communities; however, these groups still mirror the national trend of increased levels of English–Afrikaans bilingualism. Future studies will be able to determine whether this trend signals a transition to increasing monolingualism in English, although the authors conclude that the cultural capital of the other languages is such that the bilingualism is, for the moment at least, stable.

In the next chapter, ‘English prepositions in isiXhosa spaces: Evidence from code-switching’, Silvester Ron Simango takes up again the question of possible grammatical influence from English, this time on isiXhosa, and particularly in the structural realm of prepositions. Drawing on conversational data recorded between 2004 and 2007, he assesses the grammatical structure of the code-switching, using the theoretical model Matrix Language Frame (MLF). While vocabulary moves with ease from one language to another, grammatical transfers are less common, and he reports that the appearance of English prepositions in isiXhosa, and the prepositional dative construction in particular, is telling of ‘either an imminent or an ongoing grammatical shift of isiXhosa towards English-like structure’ (p. 324).

Chapter 16, ‘Aspects of sentence intonation in Black South African English’, continues the theme of contact-induced change, but focuses on a lesser-researched feature, namely the intonation system. Against a backdrop of studies on varieties of English around the globe, and the intonation of New Englishes in particular, Sabine Zerbian characterises aspects of Black South African English prosody relating to information structure. As she concludes, despite the alleged conservativeness of intonation features, when characteristics of the intonation systems are taken into account, interesting patterns of change come to light. She attributes the similarities that emerge across different English varieties to the bilingualism of the speakers and not to interference from the substrates. In short, there seems little doubt that prosody used for focus and givenness (as opposed to structurally used prosody) is ‘prone to change in language contact’ (p. 345).

In the next chapter, ‘The development of cognitive-linguistic skills in multilingual learners: A perspective of Northern Sotho-English children’, Carien Wilsenach investigates the early introduction of English in two primary schools in a low-SES suburb in the Gauteng province of South Africa. The focus of her research is on whether the cognitive and metalinguistic skills supporting literacy can transfer to an additional language, and thus lead to more balanced bilingual learners; specifically, she looks at the skills associated with vocabulary and phonological awareness. The findings show that L1 knowledge of words and concepts did not transfer; however, there was a positive transfer of phonological awareness skills between Northern Sotho and English, suggesting that ‘a bilingual education model should be entirely possible in the South African multilingual contexts’ (p. 366).

The final chapter, ‘Linguistic interference in interpreting from English to South African Sign language’, is a welcome contribution to the volume being the first corpus-based study of South African Sign Language (SASL). As Ella Wehrmeyer points out, the influence of the dominant (spoken) language on a sign language is not well understood; this is the first study of its kind to analyse complex sentences, as well as mouthings, brow actions and fingerspelling. The study is based on a corpus of interpreted news broadcasts (using interpreters with mother-tongue SASL competence). The results show the main areas of influence from English to be the high frequency of mouthing and subject-foregrounded syntactic structures; brow actions and functions, on the other hand, appear to be mostly resistant to influence from English intonation (p. 387).

To conclude, I must point out that this volume is dedicated to Rajend Mesthrie, whose studies of language variation, change and contact in the South African context have significantly influenced, as Hickey emphasises in the preface, ‘the wider community of language students and scholars alike’ (p. xxi). This fine collection of studies is a fitting tribute to his remarkable scholarship.