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Chapter 3 - South African English, the Dynamic Model and the Challenge of Afrikaans Influence

from I - A Framework for English in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2019

By
Ian Bekker
Edited by
Raymond Hickey
Raymond Hickey
Affiliation:
Universität Duisburg–Essen
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Summary

South African history provides a uniquely complex environment for the development of New Englishes, a fact reflected in recent work which has both questioned Schneider’s Phase-4 ‘placement’ of South African English (SAfE) in terms of the Dynamic Model (DM) and argued for refinements to the DM to account for SAfE’s current relative lack of homogeneity and the different phases that different South African Englishes appear to be in. It is argued here that the sociohistorical role played by the Afrikaans-speaking community is the main source of this unique complexity. The European background of the IDG strand created conditions for extremely rapid convergence with the STL strand, in effect ‘collapsing’ Phases 1 to 3 of the DM. Concurrently, Afrikaner separatism and nationalism actualized a countervailing divergent tendency that has not been incorporated into the DM. Thus, the DM rests on an overly optimistic social psychology and sociology, with an over-emphasis on convergent forces; while the actualization of this convergence explains existing developmental similarities across New Englishes worldwide, it is an historical accident unreflective of a ‘deeper’ (universal) balance between centripetal and centrifugal forces.

Keywords

Dynamic Modelpostcolonial EnglishesSouth AfricaNew EnglisheskoinéizationSouth African EnglishAfrikaanslinguistic divergenceBakhtin
Type
Chapter
Information
English in Multilingual South Africa
The Linguistics of Contact and Change
 , pp. 30 - 51
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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