The status of Isicamtho, an Nguni-based urban variety of Soweto

Slang registers, code-switching and restructured urban varieties in South Africa

“…1 Though they have been studied from a number of perspectives, there is little consensus over the essential character of these phenomena. They have been described in various terms ranging from slang (Schuring 1983;Mfusi 1992), new languages (Ntshangase 1995;Makhudu 1995), as manifestations of code-switching, some of which have fossilised (Slabbert & Myers-Scotton 1997: 325), as possible outgrowths of an original pidgin-like variety (Makhudu 1980) and as restructured varieties (Childs 1996;Holm 1989: 350). Functionally, some of them have been characterised as secret languages (e.g.…”

“…Some authors (e.g. Ntshangase 1995;Childs 1996) take the extreme examples of code-switching evident in Iscamtho of the Johannesburg area as suggestive of a new language being born with neologistic vocabulary and syntax. Our analysis, however, proposes that the syntactic and/or insertional switching associated with some tsotsitaals does not occur without the urban language it is associated with readily admitting such switching a priori.…”

“…We therefore rexamine two difficult examples of antilanguage in detail, as they appear to be exceptions that prove (= 'test') the analysis we offer in this article. The first example comes from Childs's (1996) thoughtful overview of Iscamtho, which points in the direction of seemingly elaborate switching, this time with English.…”

Intergenerational Communication Beliefs Across the Lifespan: Comparative Data from Ghana and South Africa

“…Nonetheless, there is much sociolinguistic and language policy work on the status of English and French in Africa (e.g., Kamwangamalu, 2002;Louw, 2004;Mazrui, 2004;Omoniyi, 2003), the rise of urban vernaculars (e.g., Childs, 1997;Githiora, 2002;McLaughin, 2001), and the decline of indigenous languages in different regions of Africa (e.g., Baldauf & Kaplan, 2004;Batibo, 2005;Muthwii, 2003) that is of the utmost communicative relevance. However, communication research per se emerging out of this continent is quite limited and is confined to the ways in which modernization impacts traditional communication, how the latter is evoked in modern contexts such as via praise poetry (e.g., Finnegan, 2002;Yankah, 1998), and how Africans mistrust new communication technologies-even the telephone and radio-through the use of derogatory language; the Akan of Ghana, for example, refer to newspapers as koowwa kratta, meaning loose-tongued (Yankah, 1995).…”

The grammatical structure of Sowetan tsotsitaal

“…In this section, the similarities between Sowetan tsotsitaal and Sowetan Zulu will be highlighted, showing clearly that tsotsitaal grammar is mostly identical to the grammar of Sowetan Zulu. Although it is sociolinguistically obvious that Sowetan tsotsitaal is more likely to be similar to Sowetan Zulu rather than Standard Zulu, the grammatical characteristics of tsotsitaal found by Ntshangase (2002) and Childs (1997) are contrasts between tsotsitaal and the standard language rather than the urban language, as discussed in the previous section. To avoid finding only the differences between standard language and urban language, and not between urban language and urban tsotsitaal, this section explicitly compares Sowetan tsotsitaal to Sowetan Zulu.…”