Rajend Mesthrie

A Handbook of Varieties of English

Compared with the regional synopses, it is in this chapter that we shall adopt a truly bird’s-eye, or even satellite, view at morphosyntactic variation across the non-standard varieties in the English-speaking world. Relevant questions that will be addressed include the following: Which are the least and, more interestingly, most frequent morphosyntactic features in non-standard varieties of Englishes worldwide, and thus true candidates for what Chambers (2001, 2003, 2004) has called vernacular universals (section 4)? What in this respect can be said and which distinctive patterns and correlations can be identifi ed for the seven world regions investigated in this Handbook (section 5), for fi rst (L1) and second (L2) language varieties and Pidgins/Creoles within and across the seven world regions (section 6), and for individual areas of morphosyntax (section 7)? It will turn out that the patterns identifi ed in section 6 are a crucial key to understanding the patterns in sections 5 and 7. The primary source for the answers to these and other questions addressed in this global synopsis is a catalogue of 76 morphosyntactic features from 11 domains of grammar which was sent to the authors of the morphosyntax chapters of this Handbook (see section 2). For each of these 76 features the authors were asked to specify into which of the following three categories the relevant feature in the relevant variety (or set of closely related varieties) falls:The Handbook is by far the most thorough reference work on phonology and the first-ever comprehensive overview of the morphology and syntax of varieties of English in the world. The Handbook consists of a two volume book accompanied by an interactive CD-ROM. The genuine speech samples and interactive maps of the CD-ROM not only supplement the printed articles by offering lively illustrations of the varieties of English around the world, but the material offered can also be used for linguistic research. The multimedia material is now also available online. Survey Articles The books feature descriptive survey articles that are authored by widely acclaimed specialists in the field and that cover all main national standard varieties, distinctive regional, ethnic, and social varieties, major contact varieties, as well as major ESL varieties; share a common core, which makes them invaluable research tools for cross-linguistic comparisons; provide information on the historical and cultural backgrounds as well as the current sociolinguistic situations in the respective regions; serve as state-of-the-art reports on major issues in current research. CD-ROM The CD-ROM not only supplements the printed volumes through interactive access to the varieties but also provides a comprehensive database with: a unique collection of speech recordings of English from around the world; sound samples that open new perspectives on the varieties of English, as speech recordings also constitute the central aspect of research - students as well as professional academics will feel encouraged to use the material for new investigations; interactive and synchronized maps that allow either phonological or morphosyntactic (grammatical) comparisons; extensive bibliographies on the relevant research literature; links to pertinent websites. Online Version The online version provides departments of English and Linguistics with the opportunity to make the multimedia tools simultaneously available to a wider number of faculty members and students. instructors can deploy the sound samples and interactive maps to enhance their classroom presentations and to highlight important language features; researchers are provided with a database of multimedia material for further study; students can employ the data when working on classroom assignments. Together, the books and the CD-ROM are an indispensable reference work and research tool for sociolinguists, dialectologists, phonologists, grammarians, typologists, and specialists in contact languages and varieties of English around the world. Given its accessible style and its rich auditory and visual support, this Handbook is also ideally suited not only for professional academics but also for undergraduate and graduate students. The editors are responsible for the following topics: Kate Burridge/ Bernd Kortmann: Australia / Pacific Archipelagos Bernd Kortmann: British Isles: Morphology and Syntax Rajend Mesthrie: Africa / South and Southeast Asia Edgar W. Schneider: The Americas / Caribbean Clive Upton: British Isles: Phonology System requirements for the CD-ROM:Hardware: Pentium 500 MHz or AMD K6-III+ 500 MHz, PowerPC G3, 64 MB RAM, 16-bit SoundcardOperating Systems: Windows 98, NT, Me, 2000, XP/ Mac OS 9.x, X 10.x/ Linux (any distribution with Kernel 2.0)Supported Browsers: Internet Explorer 5.5 or 6 (Mac OS: Internet Explorer 5.1)/ Netscape 7.x/ Mozilla 1.0/ Mozilla Firefox 0.8Plugins: Macromedia Flash Player 6/ Acrobat Reader

‘When you hang out with the guys they keep you in style’: The case for considering style in descriptions of South African tsotsitaals

Abstract The collection of South African urban language phenomena called Tsotsitaal, Scamtho, Ringas (in short ‘Tsotsitaals’) etc, have been described differently as code-switching, mixed languages, or essentially slang vocabulary. These descriptions however, fail to acknowledge the centrality of performance to these phenomena. Tsotsitaals draw on extra-linguistic modes of identity performance such as body language, clothing, and other facets of what could commonly be called ‘style’. This article uses Couplands (2007) description of style to understand how tsotsitaals can be viewed as discursive practices performed to achieve social meaning. The research draws on fieldwork conducted in Cape Town in 2006–2007 to expand our understanding of tsotsitaals. It considers perceptions of the style associated with tsotsitaals from the viewpoint of both speakers and listeners in a township community in Cape Town. We argue that current terminology used for varieties of this sort is inadequate to describe the combination of performance, lexicon and style associated with tsotsitaals.

Mock Languages and Symbolic Power: The South African Radio Series "Applesammy and Naidoo.".

This paper examines the text of a popular radio series in Natal in the 1940s, Applesammy and Naidoo by Ray Rich, with a view to adding to the historical data base on Indian South African English. In order to ascertain its reliability as a source of colloquial data a comparison is made between direct speech of the Indian characters in the series and tape recordings of pre-basilectal speakers (the least proficient within Indian South African English). These comparisons reveal that although the radio series draws on constructions that do occur in the dialect/interlanguage of the times, the grammatical functions of these constructions are greatly distorted. Rather than illuminating early forms of the dialect in question, the text reveals more about the nature of linguistic stereotyping. This turns out to parallel social stereotyping, especially in the nature of the overgeneralisations involved. The term ‘mock language’ seems most appropriate for the parody under discussion (cf. Hill, 1993; Ronkin and Karn, 1999), which serves to reinforce relations of what Bourdieu describes as ‘symbolic power’.

Tom McArthur's English Today

Tom McArthurs contribution to English language studies has been immense, and has had a powerful impact at a number of levels. Tom started his life as an educator, gaining crucial exposure to English across the globe very early in his career, when in one of his first jobs teaching English at the Cathedral School in Bombay (Mumbai). After a varied academic career, which included a post at the University of Quebec, Tom returned to the UK to start a new journal for Cambridge University Press, English Today. Toms brief at that time was to be the founding editor of a journal that would inform a wide readership about the highways and byways of the English language, during an era when English was becoming a global language at an unprecedented speed.

Assessing representations of South African Indian English in writing: An application of variation theory

This article examines three representations of South African Indian English in print: The Adventures of Applesammy and Naidoo ( 1946 ) by Ray Rich; The Lahnees Pleasure (c. 1972 ) by Ronnie Govender; and The Wedding ( 2001 ) by Imraan Coovadia. The use of dialect is a defining feature of all three texts. I show that the tools provided by variation theory are particularly useful in the analysis of literature that uses direct speech to portray characters and types. In particular, the principles of variation theory can be used to: (a) reveal the nature of stereotyping in the first text (a parody), which relies on the suppression of variation, and the generalization of linguistic and social characteristics; (b) evaluate the fidelity of a “realist” dialect representation of the community in the second text (a play); and (c) help characterize the nonrealist, nonstereotyping, imaginative use of language in the third text (a post-modern novel). An early version of the research for this article was presented at the IAWE (International Association of World Englishes) Conference, Potchefstroom University, 2001; at seminars at the University of Cape Town and University of Pennsylvania in 2002; and at NWAVE (New Ways of Analysing Variation in English and Other Languages), Stanford University, 2002. A revised and expanded version was presented at ASNEL (Association for the Study of New English Literatures), Magdeburg, 2003. I thank participants at these conferences and three anonymous LVC referees for feedback and comments, Malcah Yaeger-Dror for discussions of her related research, and Sarah and Clare Johnson for the graphics. I am especially grateful to the University of Cape Towns Research Committee for a grant that supported this research.

Necessary versus Sufficient Conditions for Using New Languages in South African Higher Education: A Linguistic Appraisal.

Abstract This paper critically examines one particular issue against the background of changes in South Africas higher education system consequent upon the advent of a non-racial democracy – the possibility of implementing multilingual instructional polices that include indigenous African languages in its universities. Currently, a great deal of applied linguistic work is being carried out on the creation of word lists and dictionaries, via translation and term creation. This paper concurs that this is a necessary step in language adaptation for the task envisaged. It uses Saussurian semantics to show that translation and/or creation of terms is not a relatively transparent activity. An examination of Saussures notion of ‘semantic value’ leads to a post-structuralist concern with use and function. This orientation to language is considered further in light of the discourse-oriented work of M.A.K. Halliday and J.R. Martin on the language of science in Writing Science, Literacy and Discursive Power, published by Falmer Press in 1993. Such discourse unfolds within a community of practice. The practices required for a translated science involve semiotic inculcation, and can be compared to the efforts of 19th-century Christian missionaries who worked on expanding Xhosa for religious purposes. These efforts show the complexities of developing Xhosa as a possible language of science, which any language planner will have to face.

Children in language shift - the syntax of fifth generation, pre-school, Indian South African English speakers

Language shift, the process by which a second language ousts a communitys first language as the everyday vernacular, almost inevitably throws up a vast array of morpho-syntactic and phonetic variety in the new vernacular. This paper seeks to ascertain what choices the first post-shift generation of child learners makes from such an array of competing forms. Data from longitudinal studies undertaken in the early to mid-1990s is presented from Indian South African English, focussing on fifth generation, monolingual, pre-school children in a natural (i.e. non-classroom) setting. The paper shows that while these children do make a selection of the morpho-syntactic variants in the elders speech, there is no syntactic innovation. On the other hand, a surprisingly large number of former second-language features persist in post-shift speech, probably enhanced by the peculiarities of apartheid society, during which these children acquired their vernacular.

English in South Africa

A discussion of the history, status, major features and general properties of English as it is used alongside Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu and other southern African languages

A Regional and Social Dialectology of the BATH Vowel in South African English

This paper provides the beginnings of a pan–South African English dialectology, characterizing five cities (Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Kimberley, Johannesburg, and Durban) and four ethnicities (Black, Colored, Indian, and White), via a single vowel, BATH (or /ɑ:/). From interviews with 200 selected speakers, 5553 tokens were subjected to acoustic analysis via PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2010), yielding bivariate data on vowel quality. Statistical analysis via analysis of variance focused on sets of five persons in each of 40 city-ethnicity-gender combinations. Overall, no city shows cohesion across all ethnic groups, though Kimberley, the smallest of the cities, and Johannesburg, the largest, come close. Conversely, no ethnicity shows cohesion across all cities, although Black speakers of traditional L2 English background come close. There is a robust regional difference for Colored speakers between Johannesburg and the other cities. Gender effects are notable: womens means are closer to the historically prestige [ɑ:] variant than the historically broader variant [ɔ:] in 6 of 20 possible groupings by city and ethnicity; in none of the cases is the opposite true.

Moodling beyond Bollywood: e-teaching the language, literature and culture of the Indian diaspora

A report on an interdisciplinary e-course experiment on language, literature and culture in the Indian Diaspora. One of the rich potentials of the World Wide Web is to enable international and interdisciplinary projects by utilizing e-learning technologies. Further, contemporary students are used to structuring much of their public and private life and learning around the use of electronic technologies. Certainly, when learning, thinking and working are no longer solitary activities, then traditional notions of teaching must be redesigned throughout our educational institutions in order to meet the challenges of the communication age – language teaching and the humanities at our universities cannot be an. Since the classroom can transcend spatially limited locations, it can transform the ‘traditional scene of instruction […] into a joint venture involving many scholars, including our students as active researchers’.