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Chapter 4 - The Historical Development of South African English: Semantic Features

from I - A Framework for English in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2019

By
Ronel Wasserman
Edited by
Raymond Hickey
Raymond Hickey
Affiliation:
Universität Duisburg–Essen
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Summary

This chapter analyses the development of over thirty semantic features of South specialisation and re-analysis of words is provided, even where some English words had no endogenous potential to develop in this way. The historical data suggest that the features had propagated considerably by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whereas the contemporary data show that these features are more likely to appear in the spoken register. More generally, this chapter argues that even though speakers of Afrikaans and South African English have not experienced any identity alignment in the traditional sense, they have maintained a kind of racial affinity within the historical South African context, which has facilitated deep-rooted, reciprocal influence. The unmistakable role of Afrikaans as activating agent in the grammaticalisation process of these features is emphasised. The findings show that the features are often more than transfers and loan translations.

Keywords

South African EnglishWhite South African EnglishAfrikaanshistorical corpussemantic featureslanguage contactcontact-induced changegrammaticalisation
Type
Chapter
Information
English in Multilingual South Africa
The Linguistics of Contact and Change
 , pp. 52 - 73
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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