"English occupies a paradoxical position in multilingual South Africa. It is the language of government, the judiciary, business, and academia, and is often portrayed as a lingua franca that enables communication across South Africa’s varied cultures. This chapter provides an overview of the position of the English language in relation to multilingualism in South Africa; early dictionary development in South Africa; and the research and development of the Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles. It concludes with a brief indication of the future directions of this dictionary.

This chapter looks at the spread of English to countries of the Southern Hemisphere, notably Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. These “Southern Hemisphere Englishes” (including the islands of Tristan da Cunha and the Falklands in the South Atlantic) have been found to have a lot in common both historically and linguistically: similar settlement periods (the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) and strategies (typically large-scale, organized settlement moves of lower- and middle-class people from the British Isles, mainly southern and south-eastern England). Their descendants today constitute large native-speaking communities of direct British ancestry. They faced similar situations – unfamiliar territory and climate and, most importantly, the need to deal and communicate with earlier residents of the areas they migrated to. In the long run, these peoples – Aboriginals in Australia; Maoris in New Zealand; Africans, Afrikaners, and later also Indians in South Africa – have adopted and transformed English, using it for their own purposes, and many of them have shifted to it, thus producing new ethnic varieties like Aboriginal English or Maori English. Cast studies and language samples focus on Australian English (including a discussion of pronunciation features in a "footie" sports program) and South African varieties of English.

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.

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.

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.

This paper summarizes scholarly approaches to varieties of South African English, mainly from the perspective of World Englishes theorizing. South Africa's complex ethnic composition has produced a range of distinctive varieties of English and has defied simplistic notions of dialect evolution. Neither Kachru's “Three Circles” model nor Schneider's “Dynamic Model” allow coherent accounts of South African English as a whole in their respective frameworks. In contrast, many South African scholars, often extrapolating from the “Dynamic Model”, have highlighted the need to focus on internal sub-varieties rather than favouring a national, overall perspective. The questions of how uniform or diverse South African English is and how these relationships can be modelled are widely addressed in scholarship, including ongoing changes, as for example the recent emergence of a pan-ethnic middle class compromise variety described primarily by Rajend Mesthrie.

The English language has been present in South Africa since the end of the eighteenth century. Although regional varieties were established as part of the nineteenth-century development of South African English (SAfE) as its own variety, the general consensus has been that since the mid-twentieth century the ancestral ‘settler’ variety of SAfE has shown a high degree of regional homogeneity and only a limited set of regionalisms. This chapter investigates more recent developments in this regard, drawing on an acoustic analysis of data from upper-middle class male and female speakers of General SAfE from the three largest urban conurbations of South Africa: Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. The focus is on vowel quality and the results include (1) greater centralization of KIN in Durban (2) a Cape Town-centered process of TRAP and DRESS lowering accompanied by STRUT backing (the so-called Reverse Short Front Vowel Shift in SAfE) (3) clearly diphthongal variants of PRICE in Johannesburg and Cape Town in comparison to Durban and (4) backed and lowered variants of GOAT in Johannesburg and Durban as compared to Cape Town. Overall the results suggest a growing degree of regional differentiation in South African English.

This chapter outlines the recent development of short front vowel lowering in South African English as it is used in Cape Town by white speakers. Using the latest acoustic and statistical methods, the chapter shows how the KIT, DRESS and TRAP vowels are lowering and retracting in the speech of young speakers when compared to older speakers. The change that has had the most profound influence on the Reverse Vowel Shift is the extreme lowering and retraction of TRAP, which causes the lowering of DRESS in a pull chain. The FOOT vowel is well established as a centralised vowel which, because of its unrounded nature in South African English, overlaps with certain retracted KIT allophones. This can be seen as the impetus for the lowering of KIT as evidenced in the chapter. The Reverse Vowel Shift is an externally motivated, prestige-driven change due to the virtual contact with particularly American Englishes.