Tsotsitaal, global culture and local style: identity and recontextualisation in twenty‐first century South African townships

Reworking and resisting globalising influences: Cape Town hip-hop

“…These contextual factors shape the evolution of popular culture in tandem with international influences on youth culture, music and language (Coplan 2008: 176;Hurst 2009). Popular culture remains a dynamic, deeply political site mobilised in renegotiations of identity and the public sphere (Dolby 2006: 33-34) that exceed the confines of a simple binary discourse of hegemony and resistance.…”

“…The practices included the mobilisation of politicised popular culture and music, undermining state efforts to censor the forms of cosmopolitan media and culture entering and circulating within the country (see Coplan 2008;Hurst 2009). The state broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), was actively involved in the promotion of apartheid ideology of separate development and codification of African languages as ethnic markers tied to cultural and geographic spaces (Barnett 1999(Barnett , 2004.…”

Risky writing: Working with a heteroglossic pedagogy to deepen pre-service teachers’ learning

“…The 'boyfriend' codeswitched to Tsotsitaal as a way of escaping and avoiding having to communicate and account for his actions. Students explained that this is because Tsotsitaal is used and understood more widely by men than women (Hurst, 2009;Bembe & Beukes, 2007). The students illustrate multivocality by not only taking on the role of a male and speaking the relevant language variety but also by emulating the imagined masculine body language.…”

Youth multilingualism in South Africa’s hip-hop culture: A metapragmatic analysis

“…Suburban Menace, under the stewardship of their label MoBCoW Records, had to consider the multilingual rap practices of some of their own rap artists who did not perform in English only. For instance, the label had a black emcee, Baza Lo, who performs rap music not only in Kaaps (a variety of Afrikaans), but also isiXhosa, SeSotho, isiZulu and Tsotsitaal (a stylect, see Hurst, 2009). Moreover, Suburban Menace also had to take into consideration that their fellow emcees and hip-hop fans were from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds and that they frequently wrote not only in texting language but a variety of speech styles.…”

“…Over the years, South African sociolinguists have demonstrated the use of Tsotistaals (stylects) (Hurst, 2009;Mesthrie, 2008), marginalized varieties of Afrikaans, such as Kaaps, and the register Sabela as used in the everyday practice of hiphop (Williams and Stroud, 2010). The scholarship on African youth languages is largely descriptive, with the occasional drawing out of the macro-social implications of how various youth languages index group identity, how those languages index resistant identity, how young people use youth languages to work towards urban project identities and how such languages structurally defy linguistic norms.…”