Linguistic variation in Afrikaans in the Southern Cape: grammatical form and function in the spoken languageof young adults

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study involves an examination of possibly distinctive features of different variants ofAfrikaans. This was done in a town in the southern Cape, in which Afrikaans is the predominanthome language and lingua franca. Different varieties of Afrikaans among current residents arewidely observed, but have not yet been described in detail. Besides giving a snapshot of currentvarieties that are in use among speakers between the ages of 18 and 25 years, this studyconsiders a sample of language use in three groups of users in order to assess how recentchanging patterns of contact in educational settings may have affected the varieties they speak.The working hypothesis is that the dialect differences between formerly socially isolatedgroups could be in the process of decreasing, as a result of fading social boundaries.This is a small-scale pilot study that tests the hypothesis. The study collected recordings ofspoken Afrikaans of young people who fall into three categories, namely (i) those whocompleted their primary and secondary schooling in the schools within a coloured residentialarea (e.g. Pacaltsdorp primary and high school), (ii) those who completed their primary andsecondary schooling in the schools within the white town areas (e.g. Outeniqua primary andhigh school), and (iii) those who started their primary schooling in a school within a colouredresidential area, but moved to a historically 'white school (a so-called Model C school) fortheir high school education.Data was elicited by using pictures of persons that participants were likely to know. Thepictures were shown to pairs of speakers as prompts to a discussion that would requirecomparable words and expressions, thus delivering comparable sets of relatively naturallyoccurring speech. The recorded data was transcribed in a corpus program (ExMaralda) so thatsalient forms could be isolated, and the regularity as well as distribution of each form could beeasily traced.The data was used to determine if and how the varieties of Afrikaans spoken by members ofthe three groups differ, and also to check whether there is evidence that the recent languagecontact between some of the coloured and white participants in their high school years had anoticeable effect on the language forms they are currently using. So the aim was to checkwhether there is evidence of speech accommodation, dialect levelling and dialect shift, as thedifferent communities gradually integrate more than before. Specific attention went tovocabulary as well as to grammatical features that stood out as markers of one rather than theother community-associated version of Afrikaans.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University