The most recent chapter in the story of the geographical spread of mother-tongue English around the world is a tale of transcultural diffusion, of places in the world which native English has spread to, not through the arrival from elsewhere of native speakers, as in the settlement of Australia, but through the transformation of communities of non-native English speakers into native-speaking communities, through language shift, as in the ongoing case of Singapore.

This chapter investigates the intersection between gender, writing and editing of published written texts and endonormativity in South African English. We focus on three sub-varieties within the South African context: two indigenous strands, Afrikaans English (AfrE) and Black South African English (BSAfE), and the settler strand, White South African English (WSAfE). We use multifactorial methods to analyse the effects of gender amongst a set of linguistic and extra-linguistic variables conditioning the genitive alternation across unedited and edited texts produced by AfrE, BSAfE and WSAfE authors. The results show that gender plays a minor role in conditioning the genitive alternation for both authors and editors, demonstrating that the genitive choices of men and women are conditioned in similar ways. As expected, linguistic factors play the greatest role in conditioning the genitive alternation. Our findings confirm recent investigations into cross-varietal and register differences and show that while the direction of the effect of linguistic factors is the same across sub-varieties and registers, the strength of these factors differs in certain sub-varieties and registers. Our findings also confirm recent findings regarding the genitive alternation in second-language varieties and suggest a possible substrate transfer effect, in especially BSAfE writing. Although editorial intervention introduces subtle shifts in preferences for the two constructions, this intervention mostly reinforces the choices of authors.

Since the introduction of democratic majority rule in the 1990s there has been major change in South African society. This change has affected language as well, with English expanding its role in the public domain and as a lingua franca in large parts of the country. Nonetheless, the other European-heritage language, Afrikaans, weighs in with more first-language speakers than English and is represented natively across different ethnicities. The black section of the population has also been experiencing language change with its greatly increased role in public and official life. New, emergent varieties, spoken especially by young black people, have enriched the linguistic landscape of South Africa and contributed significantly to its dynamism.

The present chapter provides a detailed look at intonation used for the marking of new and given information in Black South African English (BSAfE). Studies show that, when listening to English, speakers of BSAfE perceive differences in prosody and prominence. Prosodic cues in the signal lead to prosodic entrainment which facilitates processing in speakers of BSAfE. However, speakers/listeners do not show metalinguistic awareness of the prosodic cues nor are these actively produced in their own speech. The findings for intonational marking of information structure in BSAfE are framed by related observations for other varieties of English in order to locate the intonational features of BSAfE in the wider context of intonation in New Englishes. The observed changes in the intonation systems of many New Englishes point to a certain instability of focus prosody.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between editorial work, endonormativity and convergence in the South African context, presenting a corpus-based quantitative case study of how editing reshapes academic writing by users of the STL (White South African English, or WSAfE) and IDG (Black South African English, or BSAfE) strands in South Africa. An inductive, exploratory quantitative method is used to identify linguistic features that distinguish unedited BSAfE and WSAfE academic writing, and edited BSAfE and WSAfE academic writing, using a corpus of edited texts and their unedited counterparts. Two features are analysed in detail: the use of downtoners and possibility modals. The findings provide support for the endonormativity of BSAfE, with WSAfE more ambiguous. The two strands are largely divergent in their usage of the two individual features. With a few exceptions, editors leave BSAfE usage patterns unaltered but sometimes change WSAfE usage to be closer to British English usage. Editing thus either leaves the stylistic distance between the two varieties unaltered or increases it. These findings support an assessment of (sometimes problematised) endonormativity at the level of the individual strands, but no strong evidence for convergence.