The story of South African English:A brief linguistic overview

Bekker, Ian

doi:10.12681/ijltic.16

Cited by 10 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 21 publications

(13 reference statements)

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“…For these three languages, there were no specific targets as regards SES. For SAE, half of the participants had to be from low SES homes, regardless of geographic location, because SAE is infrequently spoken as home language in rural areas, but does vary according to SES (see Mesthrie, 2002 ; Bekker, 2012 ). Table 1 shows the number of the participants and their demographic information.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sociocultural Factors Affecting Vocabulary Development in Young South African Children

et al. 2021

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Sociocultural influences on the development of child language skills have been widely studied, but the majority of the research findings were generated in Northern contexts. The current crosslinguistic, multisite study is the first of its kind in South Africa, considering the influence of a range of individual and sociocultural factors on expressive vocabulary size of young children. Caregivers of toddlers aged 16 to 32 months acquiring Afrikaans (n = 110), isiXhosa (n = 115), South African English (n = 105), or Xitsonga (n = 98) as home language completed a family background questionnaire and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) about their children. Based on a revised version of Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological systems theory, information was obtained from the family background questionnaire on individual factors (the child’s age and sex), microsystem-related factors (the number of other children and number of adults in the child’s household, maternal level of education, and SES), and exosystem-related factors (home language and geographic area, namely rural or urban). All sociocultural and individual factors combined explained 25% of the variance in expressive vocabulary size. Partial correlations between these sociocultural factors and the toddlers’ expressive vocabulary scores on 10 semantic domains yielded important insights into the impact of geographic area on the nature and size of children’s expressive vocabulary. Unlike in previous studies, maternal level of education and SES did not play a significant role in predicting children’s expressive vocabulary scores. These results indicate that there exists an interplay of sociocultural and individual influences on vocabulary development that requires a more complex ecological model of language development to understand the interaction between various sociocultural factors in diverse contexts.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sociocultural Factors Affecting Vocabulary Development in Young South African Children

et al. 2021

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“…As she says, ‘language is my profession’. Mia's variety of English is distinctly South African (Bekker, 2012), with phonetic and phonological features that evidently marks her as a South African English speaker, certainly within the New Zealand context. Mia was a participant in an earlier study I conducted (Barkhuizen & de Klerk, 2006) that aimed to investigate the language‐ and identity‐related, pre‐departure perceptions of prospective immigrants.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As she says, 'language is my profession' . Mia's variety of English is distinctly South African (Bekker, 2012), with phonetic and phonological features that evidently marks her as a South…”

Section: The Participantmentioning

confidence: 99%

South African English, social inclusion and identity integration in New Zealand

Barkhuizen

2020

World Englishes

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A few months before immigrating to New Zealand, an Afrikaans‐English bilingual woman was interviewed in South Africa about her expectations of her sociolinguistic life in her new country. Fifteen years later she was interviewed again, in New Zealand. This article tells the story of her pre‐departure expectations and desires, and her retrospective meaning making of the experiences she had lived since her arrival in New Zealand. This longitudinal narrative study focuses on her use of South African English in the host country, particularly in the community and the workplace, and pays attention to its reception by others in these contexts. The study draws on a cognitive‐developmental model of identity integration to frame the analysis of interview data from a narrative perspective. It does so by using short story analysis (Barkhuizen, 2016). Short stories are extracts of interview data in story form and are analyzed for their content and varying scales of context. Three short stories are analyzed in this article. They show how the participant's English is used and received in New Zealand and what effect this has on her life and identity as an immigrant in the country over time.

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“…The outcome of this was a sociolectal continuum which was generally referred to as 'South African English' and now more accurately as 'White' SafE. 47 These L1 speakers are usually sub-divided into Cultivated or Conservative, approximating the external British standard, Respectable or General, a wide-spread local but still exo-normative standard, and Extreme or Broad, with links to the working class and political-ideological overtones. 48 All of these can be accommodated in the Inner Circle, especially since General SAfE has spread at the expense of the other two.…”

Section: Circles Stages and Choicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The world in one country: English in South Africa

Richter¹

2023

Danubius Noster

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As the allusion in the title to the unintentionally humorous phrasebook published in the nineteenth century suggests, broken English and mistranslation have long been a source of humour and condemnation. Both of them abound due to the increasing prevalence of English in the world and the challenges posed by learning and using a foreign language, and by using translation to bridge the gap between English and other languages. If we add to this the appropriation of English by its speakers beyond the lands of the English, we appreciate some of the issues the spread of the English language in the world brings to the fore. The Englishes spoken in the 21st century are an outcome of the history of the English language, which is in turn bound up with the history of the speakers of the language. In what follows, we will start at the beginning and consider in broad strokes how English came to be, where it went, and how and why it spread. For this I will use as a framework the four diasporas, of spread. Thereafter, suggestions will be shared on how best to approach the study of world Englishes and global Englishes. First of all, how do Englishes vary? Secondly, how are the varieties of World Englishes distributed across the globe, and how can they be grouped into categories? Thirdly, theoretical models that researchers have suggested to help us understand the processes underlying the phenomenon will be presented. Kachru’s Three Circle Model (1992), Schneider’s Dynamic Model (2007) and De Swaan’s Global Language System (2004) have all had a major influence on this field of study and each of them can help us to make sense of the complexly interconnected, diverse aspects of World Englishes. In the final part of this paper, these themes are pulled together by looking at a concrete example. The focus will be on South Africa and how English is spoken there. Once again, we will look at how English came to be spoken there, where the language went and who its speakers were and are. To this end, the specific history of South Africa will be sketched, making the links with the spread of the English language, and relating its use to the use of other languages in the area. The paper will end with a description of the current language situation, the popular and academic debates about English in education, and a discussion of the ambiguous place South African English holds in the general scheme of World Englishes.

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The story of South African English:A brief linguistic overview

Cited by 10 publications

References 21 publications

Sociocultural Factors Affecting Vocabulary Development in Young South African Children

Sociocultural Factors Affecting Vocabulary Development in Young South African Children

South African English, social inclusion and identity integration in New Zealand

The world in one country: English in South Africa

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