“Eish it’s getting really interesting”: borrowed interjections in South African English

Abstract

This article offers a descriptive account of seven interjections, eish, yho, tjo, sho, hayi, hau, and mxm, which are adopted from different local South African languages into South African English. It investigates the frequencies, orthography, syntactic position, collocational forms and discourse-pragmatic roles of these seven interjections, through the lens of pragmatic borrowing and postcolonial corpus pragmatics. The data were retrieved from the South African segment of the Global Web-based English corpus and underwent quantitative and qualitative analysis. The findings indicate that the interjections are all emotive interjections, which mostly express negative emotions, except hayi, which is a phatic interjection that is largely used to show disapproval of some information. All the interjections favour clause-initial position except mxm, which is a loan interjection that represents the kiss-teeth or suck-teeth oral gesture that is common in some parts of Africa and the Caribbean. The article affirms that these loaned interjections accentuate the distinction of South African English from other varieties of English.