Ethnicity and Language Variation
Grammar and Code-switching in the Afrikaans Speech Community
©2012
Monographs
298 Pages
Series:
Schriften zur Afrikanistik / Research in African Studies, Volume 19
Summary
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.
Details
- Pages
- 298
- Publication Year
- 2012
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631621653
- Language
- English
- Keywords
- Sociolinguistics Grammatical variation South Africa Namibia
- Published
- Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2011. 297 pp., num. tables and graphs
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG