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Chapter 9 - Youth Language in South Africa: The Role of English in South African Tsotsitaals

from II - Sociolinguistics, Globalisation and Multilingualism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2019

By
Heather Brookes
Edited by
Raymond Hickey
Raymond Hickey
Affiliation:
Universität Duisburg–Essen
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Summary

In interactions with their peers, South African male youths use a way of talking that is different from the local varieties spoken in their communities. Labelled tsotsitaals, this practice involves inserting a slang lexicon into the syntactic base of a local language combined with other paralinguistic features. Most studies of this phenomenon have looked at Afrikaans and Bantu language-based tsotsitaals but there are also several instances of English-based tsotsitaals among male youths in English-speaking communities. Across all tsotsitaals, English-derived words make up a substantial part of the slang lexicon. Ethnographic studies among young men who use Bantu-based tsotsitaals show that English plays a key role in indexing different identities. Based on the social meanings they attribute to English use, they incorporate English in a variety of ways making up different styles of tsotsitaal. These styles reflect different social levels, identities, attitudes and aspirations. The way English is incorporated into tsotsitaals challenges common approaches that treat this performance register as an autonomous referential system.

Keywords

tsotsitaalyouth languagemale urban slangBantu languagesvernacular lexiconcode-switchingsociolinguistic variation
Type
Chapter
Information
English in Multilingual South Africa
The Linguistics of Contact and Change
 , pp. 176 - 195
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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