Cape Town's District Six lies on the southeastern edge of what is called the City Bowl, which is the area between Table Bay and the arc of mountains (most prominently the famous Table Mountain) at the northern end of the Cape Peninsula. In 1838, a farm that abutted the old city, Zonnebloem, was developed into a residential area. That same year, formerly enslaved persons were granted freedom of movement and the right to bargain for wages. The first inhabitants of what would become District Six included a large number of emancipated slaves, along with native Africans, European settlers, and persons of mixed ancestry. In 1867, the Cape Colonial Parliament passed the Cape Town Municipality Amendment Act, which created six municipal wards for the purpose of administration and governance, whence the name District Six. The ethnic and cultural diversity of District Six was enhanced further still in the late nineteenth century with the arrival of immigrants from Europe (including a wave of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, who introduced a Yiddish-speaking adstratum), North America, Asia, as well as other parts of South Africa. Inevitably, the more prosperous residents relocated elsewhere, leaving District Six to endure its share of poverty, neglect on the part of government and absentee landlords, and the attendant urban ills. But what emerged was a vibrant, cosmopolitan, working-class community that had cultivated a strong sense of identity and cohesiveness.

In 1966 District Six was proclaimed a white group area and condemned for demolition. The stated rationalization was urban renewal. The legal bases of these actions were two foundational pieces of apartheid legislation that had been enacted in 1950: the Population Registration Act, which required the racial categorization of all South Africans, and the Group Areas Act, which specified urban zones in which members of one racial group alone were permitted to live and work. By 1980, some 60,000 people of Colour had been involuntarily resettled in the Cape Flats—their homes and businesses were razed, and streets were broken up. A tourist map of the city from this period identifies the area as: “Zonnebloem. Redevelopment is planned.” In 1979, an act of Parliament established the Cape Technikon (today part of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology), the master plan for which called for a new campus to be situated on a tract of land once inhabited by people. Some terraced homes were built along the periphery in the late 1980s. However, organized protest, threatened boycotts, and smoldering anger dissuaded private interests from “redeveloping” District Six.

What remained of District Six in 1982—the year in which I first visited Cape Town—was an expanse of vacant land not far from the city center—punctuated by a few houses of worship and a school building that were left standing—along with a small section that lay just outside the boundaries of the 1966 proclamation and was not torn down. Its fate remained uncertain until 1984, when it was zoned as a commercial area (as distinct from a residential area, which would have been subject to laws requiring racial segregation). Thus, the residents of the 220 houses located among warehouses, small factories, shops, and schools were allowed to stay on. This is the Chapel Street neighborhood, a bilingual (Afrikaans-English) working-class enclave. Of central concern in McCormick's study is the linguistic repertoire of the residents, their language preferences and attitudes, and how they deploy linguistic resources in various domains.

McCormick's perspective on her subject is panchronic. Dutch was the dominant language in Cape Town during the period of Dutch East India Company control (1652–1795), alongside which a Cape Dutch vernacular came into being among proletarized segments of colonial society. English gained the upper hand as the language of the urban economy and government during the British colonial era (1806–1910), but other languages continued to be spoken, including the Cape Dutch Vernacular (today Afrikaans) by members of the underclass. Her chronicle of ethnic diversity and language contact in Cape Town does efficient justice to the historical context, and my quibbles are minor. For example, it is Genootskap van (not vir) Regte Afrikaners (Society of True Afrikaners); the year in which Afrikaans was recognized as an official language was 1925, not 1926 (p. 32). It is hard for the outsider to imagine the District Six community as it used to be, but McCormick does a creditable job in bringing it alive.

Primary fieldwork was conducted during the 1980s, as part of a University of Cape Town doctoral dissertation project and updated with a brief follow-up survey in late 1999 and early 2000, following the establishment of a new democratic order in South Africa. The result is a rich corpus of data that includes 68 hours of tape-recorded material from 158 speakers in various settings: formal interviews, community meetings, family conversations in private homes, and children interacting with other children and with adults. An assessment of McCormick's methodology must take account of the political (and legal) realities that prevailed during the last decade of apartheid. In that context resident participant observation was not practical. The best option was for McCormick to establish a neighborhood base at the privately endowed Marion Institute, which offered a nursery school and community center. Here she had the opportunity to cultivate relationships with community members to a point where she could become a trusted visiting participant observer in some domains, while relying on insiders as interviewers in other domains.

The linguistic repertoire of the Chapel Street enclave comprises vernacular forms of Afrikaans and English alongside the standard varieties of these languages. The local varieties exist along a dialect continuum connecting working-class, primarily Coloured areas in and around Cape Town (p. 88). Ordinarily, exposure to Standard English and Standard Afrikaans occurs during years of compulsory schooling; most residents utilize the standard varieties far less than their nonstandard counterparts; and few control the full range of either language. There is community-wide agreement about what constitutes appropriate language choices for various purposes and occasions.

Paradoxically, perhaps, Afrikaans and English are at once polarized and intermingled. Chapel Street residents are aware of the symbolism of these languages as social constructs. From the National Party's ascent to power in 1948 through the 1980s, Standard Afrikaans came to be identified with white domination. However, recent political changes have occasioned a revaluation of Afrikaans in all of its varieties (p. 109). On the whole, attitudes toward English are more favorable than toward Afrikaans (p. 101). English is variously associated with international prestige, urban sophistication, and upward economic mobility. Standard English remains the preferred medium of formal discourse, both spoken and written. Yet, McCormick can discern no trend toward language shift in favor of English in the Chapel Street neighborhood. The local dialect of Afrikaans—importantly, in alternation with English as an unmarked choice—indexes community identity. Speakers alternate between languages to a degree that is quite unknown in mainly white bilingual communities.

Following Alvarez-Cáccamo 1998 and Auer 1998, 1999, McCor-mick insists that CODES and LANGUAGE VARIETIES must be conceptually separated (p. 192). She refers to codes and code-switching only where the language varieties and the alternation between them “[seem] to have some significance for members of the speech community” (p. 89). When the alternation is not significant, she refers to it as language switching. McCormick draws an additional distinction between “switching,” which refers to the alternation of phrases or longer chunks in one code or language with those of another, and “mixing,” which designates the incorporation of single lexical items from one language into phrases in the other and also the affixing of morphemes from one language onto morphemes from the other language (pp. 89–91). The latter is exemplified by Dan word ek gepamper nou (then become I PAST PART.=pamper now) ‘Then I am pampered now’ (p. 179). In principle, then, there will be instances of language switching without code switching, of language switching with code switching, and of code switching without language switching, that is, a switch in dialects.

There are also utterances that contain neither code switching nor language switching (p. 192). The local dialect of Afrikaans has strong solidarity value and therefore qualifies as a code, by McCormick's definition above. It is at the same time described as a mixed code in the sense of Auer 1998:16–20, where the alternation between two languages does not carry meaning as language choice for the bilingual participants. If one prefers, one could say that speakers carry out conversations in the mixed mode of a bilingual medium, without attending to the linguistic origin of the elements they are using (Gafaranga and Torras i Calvo 2001:205–206).

Despite many locally arresting insights, the conceptual framework in which McCormick's study is grounded seems to me at times cumbersome and arbitrary. Considering that bilingual conversation has been extensively discussed in the literature (with which McCormick is thoroughly familiar), one can understand how the author would be concerned to situate her analysis within a finely calibrated model. Still, McCormick adds to an already confusing array of terms that describe various aspects of bilingual verbal behavior. The term “mixing” for lexical insertion seems to me an unfortunate choice, given a) its generic meaning, b) the fact that some researchers use “code mixing” to designate momentary switches that may involve more than a single word, and c) the fact that “language mixing” (for example, Auer 1999) and “mixed codes”—at least as I would use these terms—are amalgams that can draw upon both defining languages for grammatical material as well as lexis.

On a related point, it is certainly true that the Chapel Street dialect “does not entirely meet the criteria used by Bakker and Mous (1994:4–7) for the definition of a mixed [that is, intertwined] language” (p. 92, my italics). Prototypically, intertwined languages involve not just the combination of the grammatical system of one language with the lexicon of another (Bakker and Mous 1994:4–7), but the two halves forming “an organic whole,” from which “one cannot remove one of the components without damaging the other component” (Bakker and Muysken 1994:49). It is the latter property, not the former, that makes an intertwined language a special kind of bilingual mixed code intended as an in-group vernacular.

There are additional issues of demarcation. Deciding whether a particular alternation constitutes language switching or is part of the mixed code is particularly delicate in the analysis of the Chapel Street repertoire, if it is the case that the distinction “seems not to be salient to the community—probably because, in practice, they can co-occur” (p. 89). Recall that “unless alternation of language varieties in a particular utterance carries meaning for participants in the interaction, it should not be referred to as ‘code-switching’” (p. 192). In chapter 8 on bilingual dialogue, it turns out that language switches “seem to be used primarily for structural and stylistic purposes” (p. 181). If so, then it must be acknowledged that stylistic choices are themselves meaningful. If language switching is to be understood as serving microstylistic and discourse functions and if code switching indexes “aspects of identity or associations with features of the wider context” (p. 181), then a micro-macro opposition would be defensible.

However, McCormick does not hold to this principle consistently. In her analysis of language use at a church guild meeting, McCormick observes: “Apart from its role in creating or challenging temporary alliances, code-switching serves stylistic and other functions […]. It helps cope with temporary lapses of memory or concentration […]. It may also signal a shift in topic” (p. 176). My purpose is not to expose an interpretive shortcoming on McCormick's part but to underscore the fluidity of the terminology both in her study and in the field generally.

Finally, I should like to take issue with two smaller points. First, one needs to be chary of terminology bloat. I consider myself a reader of at least average intelligence and understanding, but I cannot get past the tautology of “alternational switching between the local dialects of English and Afrikaans” (p. 93) and “alternational language-switching” (p. 186). McCormick's model already takes account of Auer's (1999:313–314) INSERTIONAL and ALTERNATIONAL types, and there is no need for the add-on.

Second, if systemic boundaries are indeterminate at some levels of usage and (lexical) mixing is the norm, then one cannot really speak of English “loanwords in the local dialect of Afrikaans” (p. 91), except in cases where speakers use an English word in an Afrikaans utterance without knowing that it is English. In historical linguistics, certainly—and also in contact linguistics (for example, Field 2002)—borrowing is typically understood as the integration of lexical items into a host language. Loanwords originate in bilingual performance and in ad hoc, nonce transfers in less intense contact situations. McCormick is well aware of these facts (p. 186), but curiously opts not to draw the necessary distinctions.

In a 1986 novel by Richard Rive, “Buckingham Palace,” District Six, the action is set in the years leading up to the demolitions. “They had taken our past away and left the rubble,” tells the author, as he inspects the remains of what was once Caledon Street. “They had sought to regulate our present in order to control our future. And as I stood there I was overwhelmed by the enormity of it all […]. How will they answer on that day when they have to account for this? For the past will not be forgotten.” The Chapel Street neighborhood, as McCormick cautions, is not quite a microcosm for greater District Six. Rather, it is a speech island within modern-day Cape Town but at the same time a vestige of the larger historical community of which it was once a part. Despite some reservations about the conceptual framework, McCormick can be credited with having produced an important contribution to the study of bilingual verbal behavior. Enclave varieties can extend our understanding of the formation and development of Afrikaans; and so for the socio-historical linguist, too, the dialogues recorded here make for fascinating reading. In addition to the book's substantive value, it is worth mentioning that the execution of the study is sensitive and respectful. Such is McCormick's linguistic monument to District Six; and I suspect it would not displease those who remember the past.