South African English


South African English is the set of English language dialects native to South Africans.

History

settlers first arrived in the South African region in 1795, when they established a military holding operation at the Cape Colony. The goal of this first endeavour was to gain control of a key Cape sea route, not to establish a permanent settler colony. Full control of the colony was wrested from the Batavian Republic following the Battle of Blaauwberg in 1806. The first major influx of English speakers arrived in 1820. About 5,000 British settlers, mostly rural or working class, settled in the Eastern Cape. Though the British were a minority colonist group, the Cape Colony governor, Lord Charles Somerset, declared English an official language in 1822. To spread the influence of English in the colony, officials began to recruit British schoolmasters and Scottish clergy to occupy positions in the education and church systems. Another group of English speakers arrived from Britain in the 1840s and 1850s, along with the Natal settlers. These individuals were largely "standard speakers" like retired military personnel and aristocrats. A third wave of English settlers arrived between 1875 and 1904, and brought with them a diverse variety of English dialects. These last two waves did not have as large an influence on South African English, for "the seeds of development were already sown in 1820". However, the Natal wave brought nostalgia for British customs and helped to define the idea of a "standard" variety that resembled Southern British English.
When the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, English and Dutch were the official state languages, although Afrikaans effectively replaced Dutch in 1925. After 1994, these two languages along with nine other Southern Bantu languages achieved equal official status.
SAE is an extraterritorial variety of English, or a language variety that has been transported outside its mainland home. More specifically, SAE is a Southern hemisphere ET originating from later English colonisation in the 18th and 19th centuries. SAE resembles British English more closely than it does American English due to the close ties that South African colonies maintained with the mainland in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, the influence of American pop culture around the world made American English more familiar in South Africa, with some American lexical items becoming alternatives to comparable British terms.

White South African English

Several white South African English varieties have emerged, accompanied by varying levels of perceived social prestige. Roger Lass describes white South African English as a system of three sub-varieties spoken primarily by White South Africans, called "The Great Trichotomy". In this classification, the "Cultivated" variety closely approximates England's standard Received Pronunciation and is associated with the upper class; the "General" variety is a social indicator of the middle class and is the common tongue; and the "Broad" variety is most associated with the working class, low socioeconomic status, and little education. These three sub-varieties, Cultivated, General, and Broad, have also sometimes been called "Conservative SAE", "Respectable SAE", and "Extreme SAE", respectively. Broad White SAE closely approximates the second-language variety of Afrikaners called Afrikaans English. This variety has been stigmatised by middle- and upper-class SAE speakers and is considered a vernacular form of SAE.

Phonology

Vowels

  • Allophonic variation in the vowel. In some contexts, such as after, the KIT vowel is pronounced ; before tautosyllabic it is pronounced ; and in other contexts it is pronounced. This feature is not present in Conservative SAE, and may have resulted from a vocalic chain shift in White SAE.
  • Pronunciation of the vowel with the long monophthongal. In contrast, other Southern Hemisphere Englishes like Australian English and New Zealand English have diphthongised .
  • Back, with lip rounding in the broader dialects. This differs from Australian English and New Zealand English, which have central instead.
  • The trap-bath split, as in New Zealand English and partially also Australian English.
  • is short, open, weakly rounded, and centralised, around.
  • is short, half-closed back and centralised, around.
  • tends to resemble the Received Pronunciation non-rhotic among Conservative SAE speakers, while the vowel is front, half-close, centralised in other varieties.

    Consonants

  • In Conservative and Respectable SAE, is the voiceless glottal fricative. In Extreme SAE, has a more breathy-voiced pronunciation,, likely as a result of a Dutch/Afrikaans substrate. is sometimes deleted in Extreme SAE where it is preserved in Conservative and Respectable SAE. For instance, when it occurs initially in stressed syllables in words like "house", it is deleted in Extreme SAE.
  • Conservative SAE is completely non-rhotic like Received Pronunciation, while Respectable SAE has sporadic moments of rhoticity. These rhotic moments generally occur in -final words. More frequent rhoticity is a marker of Extreme SAE.
  • Unaspirated voiceless plosives in stressed word-initial environments.
  • Yod-assimilation: tune and dune tend to be realised as and, instead of the Received Pronunciation and.

    Black South African English

Black South African English, or BSAE, is spoken by individuals whose first language is an indigenous African tongue. BSAE is considered a "new" English because it has emerged through the education system among second-language speakers in places where English is not the majority language. At least two sociolinguistic variants have been definitively studied on a post-creole continuum for the second-language Black South African English spoken by most Black South Africans: a high-end, prestigious "acrolect" and a more middle-ranging, mainstream "mesolect". The "basilect" variety is less similar to the colonial language, while the "mesolect" is somewhat more so. Historically, BSAE has been considered a "non-standard" variety of English, inappropriate for formal contexts and influenced by indigenous African languages.
According to the Central Statistical Services, as of 1994 about seven million black people spoke English in South Africa. BSAE originated in the South African school system when the 1953 Bantu Education Act mandated the use of native African languages in the classroom. When this law was established, most of the native English-speaking teachers were removed from schools. This limited the exposure that black students received to standard varieties of English. As a result, the English spoken in black schools developed distinctive patterns of pronunciation and syntax, leading to the formation of BSAE. Some of these characteristic features can be linked to the mother tongues of the early BSAE speakers. The policy of mother tongue promotion in schools ultimately failed, and in 1979, the Department of Bantu Education allowed schools to choose their own language of instruction. English was largely the language of choice because it was viewed as a key tool of social and economic advancement. BSAE has contrasting pronunciation and organisation of vowels and consonants compared to the ones in standard English. For instance, "it lacks the tense/lax contrast and central vowels in the mesolectal variety."

Classification

The difference between Black and White South Africans is based on their ethnic backgrounds, with them, as BSAE, being originally the first indigenous people that made a new English South Africa and developing speaking their tongue version of English and deciding not to speak South Africa's native language of English, which is mostly exclusive for them due to it not being the majority language. In SAE it is primarily used for publicising the differences between British and other forms of tongue speaking for native speakers in various communities of South Africa.
The local native language of Black South African "new" English would lean more on the syllable side and would lean less on stress timing; due to this, the speech of the language would be affected by the length of vowel deduction in "new" English.

Phonology

BSAE emerged from the influence of local native languages on the British English variety often taught in South African schools. After dispersing BSAE has been seen as three distinct subvarieties: the basilect, mesolect, and acrolect. Not much has yet been studied on the subvarieties of BSAE, and the distinctions between them are not yet fully defined. However, there are some notable pronunciation differences in the mesolect and acrolect.
The vowels in BSAE can be realised as five key phonemes: /i/, pronounced in words like "FLEECE" or KIT, /u/ in "FOOT" or "GOOSE", /ɛ/ in "TRAP", "DRESS", or "NURSE", /ɔ/ in LOT or FORCE, and /a/ as in CAR. /i/ may occasionally be pronounced in the acrolectal variety, though there is no consistent change among speakers. One difference in the acrolect in comparison to the mesolect is that it often uses in place of .
In addition, many vowels that are normally diphthongs in most varieties are monophthongs in BSAE. For example, "FACE" in General White SAE is typically pronounced as /feɪs/, but in BSAE is typically pronounced /fɛs/.

Grammar

Black South African English analysis has not been researched or utilised enough due to its contrasting methods to Southern British norms. BSAE has contrasting pronunciation and organisation of vowels and consonants compared to the ones in more commonly used languages such as other varieties of English. Due to English being an official language of South Africa, dialects that have contrary methods in language and pronunciation to English become isolated from the speech in that area. For instance, "it lacks the tense/lax contrast and central vowels in the mesolectal variety."
In Black South African English, the length of vowels is changeable, and vowel length can be understood as stress placement, with some deviation from Standard English. An example of this is in the word "sevénty", which has primary stress on the penultimate, rather than the initial, syllable.
Additionally, BSAE differs from other forms of dialect by "having shorter tone/information units and having lower pitch and decrease intensity as the sentence concludes."
Certain words such as "maybe" are used as conditional words that imply the result of something if a thing or event were to happen. Another distinctive trait of BSAE is the use of the word "that" as a complementiser. BSAE also has a high frequency of the retention of question word order, 0.86 per 1000 words.
Other findings show that the Cultural Linguistic explorations of World Englishes have been evaluating BSAE based on its cognitive sociolinguistic principles. It is a language that is still being studied due to its strong cultural and traditional ties to its mother tongues.