Sarah Slabbert

l'm a cleva!: the linguistic makeup of identity in a South African urban environment

Rapid urbanization and the approach adopted by the authorities during the previous dispensation have left the new democratic government with townships and informal settlements on the peripheries of the urban concentrations of South Africa. Contact at all levels between Speakers of the nine Bantu languages of South Africa, together with the process of modernization, characterize the social dynamics of these urban societies. The result has been multilingual communities that interact on a daily basis in the urban areas and their peripheries in both a dynamic and complex range of contexts. Multilingual interaction fuelled by the competitive forces of supply and demand coupled with the free movement of communities have resulted in a hybrid form of identity, which distinguishes urban people from their rural counterparts. This paper examines the relationships that exist between the languages and Speech varieties of some selected urban communities and their ethnic and assumed linguistic identities. It has been found that the boundaries and distinctions between ethnic identities and the identities assumed by urban residents become blurred and indistinct, with their lifestyles and sociocultural characteristics changing as they are absorbed within the urban areas of South Africa.

A socio-historical overview of codeswitching studies in the African languages

South African studies in codeswitching (CS) have tended to follow the history of African linguistics. They also run parallel with studies on CS in the rest of Africa. A socio- historical critique of language contact phenomena reveals perspectives that have evolved hand in hand with the social history, not only of South Africa but also of colonial and postcolonial Africa. This would explain for example the emphasis on the interaction between the colonial languages and the indigenous languages in CS patterns which is a typical feature of CS studies in Africa and other post-colonial societies. The more recent trend to focus on CS between the African languages themselves should further be regarded as a function of socio-historical development. Extensive CS on its part raises theoretical questions about language change, language shift, convergence, the pragmatic issues that are associated with each of them and their effects on the social fibre of Southern Africa.

We just mix : code switching in a South African township

This study concentrates on the interaction between languages with similar morphological and syntactic structures. It will show that code switching between morphosyntactically similar languages ofequal social function has certain implicationsfor the matrix language-frame modelfor code switching which has been developed by Myers-Scotton (1993b). The two languages under scrutiny here are Southern Sotho and Tswana, two very closely related and functionally equivalent languages spoken in South Africa. In certain contexts the Speakers ofthese languages will switch frequently from the one language to the o t her. The paper will investigate how the matrix language in this multiple switching can be determined and whether the distinction between the matrix and the embedded language is still relevant in such a Situation. Given the relatedness ofthe two languages, the implicationsfor the constraints which the matrix language-frame model proposes will also be examined. The paper concludes that in this case an interlanguage has developed which must be regarded as a merger between the two languages. This is particularly salient in the South African context since the harmonisation of the Sotho and Nguni languages respectively has been put forward as the Nhlapo-Alexander proposal (Alexander 1989).

Jam or cheese? The challenges of a national broadcaster in a multilingual context

Abstract In contrast to commercial broadcasters, national broadcasters are partly subsidised by taxpayers’ money and therefore have a mandate to serve their particular society within the context of the current political system. In democratic societies these mandates typically have to balance out the following challenges: • A limited number of available television channels and radio stations • Equity in terms of audience home language/language variety • Audience preferences and values • Audience ratings and the subsequent advertising income. The paper demonstrates that a public broadcaster can promote diversity and multilingualism AND be commercially successful. The multilingual soap operas produced for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) will be the case in point. Moreover, the case studies will show how commercially successful multilingual soap operas can give new status to marginalised languages.

What Turns You On!: An Exploration of Urban South African Xhosa and Zulu Youth Texts.

The status of the current standard African languages has been seriously undermined by factors such as the association of the standardisation process with colonial and neo-colonial structures, the lack of function of the standards and the rise of high status non-standard urban varieties. This paper describes the process leading to and some interesting outcomes drawn from a pilot literary competition whose aim, apart from encouraging urban youth to use the languages they speak everyday in the creation of literature, was to contribute to the development and analysis of oral and literary texts for wider use in urban schools. The literary competition focused on grades 8 and 9 Xhosa and Zulu learners in the Eastern Cape, Gauteng and KwaZulu Natal provinces in South Africa. Learners were invited to enter various genres and no subject restrictions were imposed, and consequently any aspect of urban lifestyle could be explored within the theme of each entry. It is anticipated that the final publication of the entries will facilitate the recognition of these urban varieties for use in the curricula of both schools and universities. This could also further result in a perceived increase in the interest of learners and students in both studying and using a more relevant form of the African languages in their day-to-day activities.