Ethnicity and Language Variation

This book discusses the linguistic reflection of ethnicity using as an illustration informal speech patterns in the bi-ethnic Afrikaans speech community. Its theoretical outlook is based on variationist studies and discourse studies on the processes shaping ethnicity. Two areas of language variation come into focus, namely Afrikaans morphosyntax and Afrikaans-English code-switching. Coloured and White speech norms are quantitatively reconstructed on the basis of a corpus of informal speech. This forms the point of departure for a qualitative reconstruction of strategies of ethnic identity negotiation. It is shown that quantifiable trends of linguistic convergence are not incompatible with enduring ethnic differentiation in speech norms.

Autorentext

Gerald Stell is a research fellow at the Free University of Brussels (V.U.B./F.W.O.). His thesis focused on language variation in informal spoken Afrikaans. His focus areas include the relationship between ethnicity and language, code-switching, morphosyntactic variation and ethnic varieties of Afrikaans.

Inhalt

Contents: Language and the Afrikaans speech community from past to present Race/ethnicity and linguistic variation Building a corpus of spoken Afrikaans Methodology for corpus analysis Grammatical variation Code-switching A reconstructed picture of language variation in the Afrikaans speech community and its implications.