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  • 4 - Tsotsitaals, Urban Vernaculars and Contact Linguistics

  • Edited by Rajend Mesthrie, University of Cape Town, Ellen Hurst-Harosh, University of Cape Town, Heather Brookes, University of Cape Town
  • Book:
    Youth Language Practices and Urban Language Contact in Africa
    Published online:
    20 August 2021
    Print publication:
    09 September 2021, pp 94-114

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the feature pool of the different tsotsitaals in terms of not just vocabulary, but morphology and especially syntax. To answer these contact-related questions, I argue that standard language, non-standard urban varieties and youth language practices (tsotsitaals) need to be studied together as a package for their commonalities, differences and the ways in which they relate to each other. I do this partly by summarising early South African approaches and assessing how they have been improved by attention being given to the urban varieties, as spoken by a wider community than just adolescent and young males in a particular in-group or informal mode. I reanalyse two studies of isiZulu-based tsotsitaal of the Johannesburg area by Ngwenya (1995) and Gunnink (2014), concluding that this tsotsitaal does not have an independent syntax from the urban variety of isiZulu.