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In this paper we provide an overview of the current status as well as broad functions of Englishes in South Africa. We also provide a discussion of some of the contemporary concerns related to the complex and multivaried nature of English in the country. This paper further serves to introduce the major themes that are of concern to those researchers that are interested in the study of South African Englishes, through an introduction of the papers that form part of this Special Issue. Finally, we discuss the current state of the art with regards to researching English in the country where we suggest potential future areas of investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multilingual repertoires of African home language and bilingual Afrikaans‐English speakers in South Africa have been investigated comprehensively in the recent past. Less attention has been paid to the language repertoires of English home language speakers. Very little is known about the nature of their repertoires and their attitudes towards the languages in their repertoires. These Inner Circle users of English are immersed in a deeply multilingual Outer Circle society where most individuals know at least two languages and the majority of the citizens know more than four languages. The use of English as a home language is also expanding in this context. In this paper, the language repertoires of urban English home language students that participated in a longitudinal language repertoire survey and a group who created language portraits are examined with a view to understand the nature of their language repertoires better. The main finding is that being English in multilingual South Africa means to be at least bilingual with a multilingual mindset. English home language repertoires in South Africa therefore differ from English home language repertoires in Inner Circle contexts like the USA and Australia; and from Outer Circle contexts like Kenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Schneider's (2003, 2007) dynamic model of the evolution of postcolonial Englishes, the phase of endonormative stabilization is 'reflected in the emergence of a new and vigorous cultural phenomenon, viz. literary creativity in English, rooted in the new culture and adopting elements of the new language variety' (Schneider, 2007: 50). In the South African context, endonormative stabilization is dated as beginning with the advent of non‐racial democracy in South Africa (that is, in 1994), linked, according to Schneider (2017: 188), to 'a broadly based and generally recognized literary creativity, spearheaded by two recent Nobel laureates: Nadine Gordimer in 1991 and J. M. Coetzee in 2003.' In this paper, this conclusion is challenged by pointing to what Brink (1976: 42) refers to as a 'vital and viable new literature' in English which emerged in the first half of the 20th‐century and which often had a striking emphasis on the interrelationship between English and the Afrikaans IDG‐strand; thus constituting a form of postcolonial English which arose well before the examples mentioned by Schneider. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of English in peer interactions among black male youth in two Johannesburg townships. We demonstrate how social meanings attached to English shape ways of using English in the expression of social identities. English is a central tool in processes of authentification and delegitimization in relation to notions of African urban male township identity. Longitudinal ethnographic work, with recordings of spontaneous peer interactions on the township streets, show how social meanings attached to using English have shifted with socio‐economic changes since 1994. These changes have impacted patterns of English use among black youth and male youth in particular. The way in which youth use English challenges structural variety approaches to youth languages in African contexts that treat them as separate linguistic varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT In this paper we discuss language-in-education practices, along with the ideologies and attitudes that undergird them, in the two countries. The focus is on the ideology of development, the essence of which is captured in the second epigraph: An education through the medium of English brings about employment, literacy, and development, personal success and upward social mobility. We discuss these presumed outcomes in the context of Kenya and South Africa, and argue that the language remains accessible only to a select few, the elite, and so do literacy and socioeconomic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on attitudes towards South African Indian English (SAIE), an L1 variety of English spoken in South Africa. The attitudes of the participants are considered against the backdrop of the socio-political history of this variety and its speakers, and in contrast to their attitudes to what they perceive as 'good' English. While the research methodology is primarily based on lengthy, semi-structured interviews with twenty young South African Indians (i.e. ingroup members), the paper also includes a discussion of some of the linguistic features of SAIE, which is mainly motivated by methodological considerations. Through an examination of SAIE wh-questions, we show that the grammar of this variety differs systematically from that of the reference variety. Using examples of these wh-questions, we elicited grammatical judgments from participants and compared these judgments to the attitudes of the participants as expressed in response to open-ended questions in interviews. On the basis of the empirical data that we obtained and analysed, we argue that the young South African Indian students who participated in our study have a profoundly ambiguous attitude towards the variety associated with their own ethno-linguistic group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-examines the debate over the emergence of Black South African English (BSAE) as a variety of English that is institutionalized with distinct properties. It focuses on the tense logic in Bantu languages and discourse markers that chiefly account for uniquely BSAE features. Through an in-depth analysis of these linguistic properties, the paper presents fresh angles of reconceptualizing the status of BSAE, which might move the debate to a level that makes sense to the policy-makers and language planners. In the end, I argue for English harmonization in South Africa as a necessary path to empowering the local masses that are otherwise excluded through the orthodox tradition of upholding British Standard English in African classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black South African English (BSAE) is generally regarded today as the variety of English commonly used by mother-tongue speakers of South Africa's indigenous African languages in areas where English is not the language of the majority. Its roots lie in the history of the teaching of English to the black people of this country, where the role models who teach English are second language learners themselves. To date, BSAE has mainly been studied within an applied linguistic framework with emphasis on its character as a second language which is deviant from standard English. An alternative view is to see it as a variety in its own right, a new or world English (Coetsee Van Rooy and Verhoef, 2000; van der Walt and van Rooy, 2002). As a consequence, a new look at norms is becoming increasingly necessary, so that decisions about learners' language competence can be made in terms of this variety. This paper reports on preliminary analyses of a recently collected corpus of Xhosa English (XE) (a sub-category of BSAE) which consists of naturalistic spoken data, and comprises some 540,000 words of Xhosa English. This large database enables empirical analysis of actual patterns of use in language, making it possible to test earlier speculations which have been based on intuition, and to explore the possibility of systematic differences in the patterns of structure and use in this particular variety. The paper focuses on 20 separate linguistic characteristics, most of which have been previously identified in the literature as being features of BSAE, and analyses each of them in turn, in order to ascertain their usage patterns and frequency of occurrence in the corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: Black South African English is generally regarded as the variety of English commonly used by mother-tongue speakers of South Africa's indigenous African languages in areas where English is not the language of the majority. This paper explores some of the problems involved in defining this variety, problems such as whether it is a `new' variety of English or a dialect, and problems relating to whose English it is: the English of those learners who have encountered only a smattering of English in informal contexts or the variety of English acquired during formal schooling. The second half of the paper focuses on the possible future of Black South African English (BSAE) against the backdrop of South Africa's new multilingual policy. Reasons for the continued appeal of English are examined, alongside the range of factors influencing the possible future growth of BSAE as a distinct variety. It is argued that South Africans are unlikely ever to be free not to learn English, owing to the huge economic, political and ideological constraints which make the `choice' of English inevitable. The success of current efforts to resist value judgements and recognise the worth of BSAE will depend not only on the goodwill of South Africans, and on the cooperation of all speakers of English, world-wide, but on the rate at which the variety drifts away from recognised standard forms of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extension of the progressive form to stative verbs is a widely discussed feature of Outer Circle varieties of English. This paper examines the semantics of the stative progressive in three corpora, representing spoken and written Indian (IndE), Kenyan (KenE) and Black South African English (BSAfE). The results reveal that the progressive form is used more frequently in spoken than written data, and most frequently in BSAfE, followed by KenE, and then IndE. All three Outer Circle varieties use the progressive form proportionally more often with stative verbs than British English. The main use of the progressive form is to convey a sense of extended duration. This Outer Circle prototype is termed an on-going state, and clearly differs from the sense of a temporary state, which is prototypical for Inner Circle varieties. There are nevertheless a substantial minority of limited duration (temporary state) uses, especially in the written data, but at the same time, a number of examples where the progressive conveys the sense of states with unlimited duration, especially in BSAfE and the spoken data. The main conclusion is that the progressive is not simply extended to stative verbs, as is argued by many previous researchers, but rather that of a different prototype, of extended duration, sanctions a wider range of uses of the progressive form with dynamic verbs and stative verbs alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of language and identity have traditionally focused on how individuals or groups use language to negotiate, construct, manage or project their social identities. What seems to have attracted very little attention, though, is how, in a given society, a language is assigned not one but multiple identities at various times in its social history. In this paper I examine the latter issue, with a focus on English in a society in transition, South Africa. In particular, I argue that besides its identity as a global language and as we-code and they-code in the sense of Gumperz (1982) , in South Africa English carries other identities: it is an ideological we-code, a pragmatic we-code and a naturalized we-code. I describe these multiple identities of the language along with their social history in South Africa, and consider their consequences for the indigenous African languages. 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks an explanation for the current tendency of female students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa, to select English rather than their L1, isiZulu, for social interactions with Zulu peers. I draw onfindings on the prominent role of women in language change, recent work on language shift and changing conceptualizations of gender. I take as given macro factors and instead explore gendered self-perceptions which might predispose speakers to select one language over the other. I draw on qualitative perception and attitudinal data collected by myself and Zulu research assistants, by means of interviews and focus groups. After discussing labels commonly used, in several languages, for men and women on campus, I consider interactional goals which may be underlying the choice of English: the desire to express politeness and respect, to embody‘campus style’, to negotiate changing relations with parents, and finally, to negotiate equitable relationships with male students on campus. I conclude that this instance of growing use of English is linked to continued gender inequity in South Africa, and does not necessarily imply impending language shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we report on an investigation into the use of English in a prison in the Eastern Cape Province, run by the Department of Correctional Services (CS) five years after the declaration of an official multilingual policy. The investigation consisted of a range of interviews and observations in this institution, aimed at establishing the extent to which the national language policy is actually being implemented on the ground. Findings suggest that the use of English predominates in the high, official domains, that there is a marked avoidance of Afrikaans, and that Xhosa, the main language of the Eastern Cape Province, increasingly occupies the lower, unofficial domains. Tensions between policy and practice are discussed, and it is argued that the CS has shown that pragmatism is a much stronger force than ideology. While the roles of Xhosa and Afrikaans appear to be in the process of reversing in the Grahamstown prison, English has emerged as stronger there than it has ever been before. And because it will continue to be a necessary prerequisite for the mobility and promotion of staff in the country as a whole, and the lingua franca for an increasingly mobile criminal population (which means the prisons are likely to become increasingly linguistically diverse, rather than settling into regional patterns), everyone will have to have some proficiency in English, which, ironically, will promote and strengthen it even more. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the University of Pretoria as a point of reference and explicates that the use of a second language as language of learning and teaching (LoL/T) could be detrimental to the academic development of students as well as to the assessment of their progress, if the students concerned do not have the expected proficiency in the LoL/T, which, in the case of the University of Pretoria, is English. The argument is motivated on the basis of the role of language in academic training and on the proficiency of the students concerned in English. The article then lists the language and language-related problems at the University of Pretoria, evaluates the measures taken by the University to resolve these problems, and closes with a description of the language planning steps which are necessary if the language issue at the University is to be handled in a satisfactory way. Although directed at circumstances at one particular South African university it is hoped that the discussion may be applicable to similar institutions in the country, in particular institutions which formerly wholly or mainly used Afrikaans as LoL/T, and have had to adopt a dual-medium approach to training since the country's democratisation in 1994. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relatively little attention has been paid to gender issues in the investigation of world Englishes, in spite of their common focus, over the past twenty years, on the analysis of (hidden) ways in which power is exercised in society. Recent studies in gender and language have begun to reveal ways in which gender contributes to linguistic pluralism and diversity in post-colonial societies. This paper draws on studies of gender and bilingualism by Gal (1978, 1979) and Burton et al. (1994), to investigate ways in which acquisition and usage patterns of English as an additional language in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, may be gendered. It extends work done for a Masters thesis (Appalraju, 1999), which first recognised and explored the gendered nature of English acquisition and usage patterns of school pupils from a rural environment. These data are contrasted with English usage patterns of Zulu-speaking pupils at an urban school. The two sets of results are interpreted in terms of the construction of gender identities, to explore ways in which gender identities may be changing in modernising contexts, and to reveal gender as one hitherto neglected factor which is impacting on the current spread of English as an additional language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]