Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T04:32:15.049Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 15 - English Prepositions in isiXhosa Spaces: Evidence from Code-Switching

from III - Language Interfaces

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2019

By
Silvester Ron Simango
Edited by
Raymond Hickey
Raymond Hickey
Affiliation:
Universität Duisburg–Essen
Get access

Summary

This chapter explores the consequences on isiXhosa of its long contact with the socio-politically dominant English language. It is shown that after nearly two centuries of English hegemony isiXhosa speakers have become increasingly bilingual in English and regularly switch between English and isiXhosa in their daily conversations. This in turn has led to heavy borrowing from English into isiXhosa. Based on code-switching data drawn from twenty naturally occurring conversations recorded in Gauteng and the Eastern Cape, the chapter reveals that English prepositions occur regularly in isiXhosa speech, including in contexts that would easily qualify as isiXhosa monolingual speech. The occurrence of these English closed-class items in isiXhosa spaces suggests that English has or is about to penetrate the grammatical structure of isiXhosa. The findings of this study point to a possible weakening of isiXhosa grammatical structure under heavy pressure from the more dominant English language.

Keywords

code-switchingborrowingmixed grammarMLF modellanguage shiftisiXhosaprepositions
Type
Chapter
Information
English in Multilingual South Africa
The Linguistics of Contact and Change
 , pp. 310 - 328
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alexander, Neville (2000). ‘English unassailable but unattainable: the dilemma of language policy in South African education’, PRAESA Occasional Papers 3. Cape Town: PRAESA.Google Scholar
Bentahila, Abdelali and Davies, Eirlys E. (1983). ‘The syntax of Arabic–French code-switching’, Lingua 59(4): 301–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernsten, Janice (1990). ‘The integration of English loans in Shona: social correlates and linguistic consequences’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Michigan State University.Google Scholar
De Klerk, Vivian (2000a). ‘Language shift in Grahamstown: a case study of selected Xhosa-speakers’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 146: 87–110.Google Scholar
De Klerk, Vivian (2000b). ‘To be Xhosa or not to be Xhosa … that is the question’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 21: 198–215.Google Scholar
Edwards, John (1994). Multilingualism. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Finlayson, Rosalie and Slabbert, Sarah (1997). ‘“We just mix”: code-switching in a South African township’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 125: 65–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finlayson, Rosalie, Calteaux, Karen and Myers-Scotton, Carol (1998). ‘Orderly mixing and accommodation in South African codeswitching’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 2(3): 395–420.Google Scholar
Gumperz, John (1982). Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Haugen, Einar (1950). ‘The analysis of linguistic borrowing’, Language 26: 210–31.Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd and Kuteva, Tania (2003). ‘On contact-induced grammaticalization’, Studies in Language 27(3): 529–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, Raymond (2010). ‘Language contact: reassessment and reconsideration’, in Hickey, Raymond (ed.), The Handbook of Language Contact. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1–28.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger (2002). ‘South African English’, in Mesthrie, Rajend (ed.), Language in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 104–26.Google Scholar
Mesthrie, Rajend (1992). English in Language Shift: The History, Structure and Sociolinguistics of South African Indian English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mesthrie, Rajend (2008). ‘“I’ve been speaking Tsotsitaal all my life without noticing it”: towards a unified account of Tsotsitaals in South Africa’, in Meyerhoff, Miriam and Nagy, Naomi (eds.), Social Lives in Language: Sociolinguistics and Multilingual Speech Communities, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 95–110.Google Scholar
Mesthrie, Rajend and Hurst, Ellen (2013). ‘Slang registers, code-switching and restructured urban varieties in South Africa: an analytic overview of tsotsitaal with special reference to the Cape Town variety’, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 28(1):103–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mougeon, Raymond and Beniak, Edouard (1991). Linguistic Consequences of Language Contact and Restriction. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, Carol (1992). ‘Comparing codeswitching and borrowing’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 13: 19–39.Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, Carol (1993). Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Codeswitching. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, Carol (2002). Contact Linguistics: Bilingual Encounters and Grammatical Outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, Carol (2004). ‘Precision tuning of the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model of codeswitching’, Sociolinguistica 18: 106–17.Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, Carol and Jake, Janice (2000). ‘Four types of morphemes: evidence from aphasia, codeswitching, and second language acquisition’, Linguistics 38(6): 1053–100.Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, Carol and Jake, Janice (2001). ‘Explaining aspects of code-switching and their implications’, in Nicol, Janet (ed.), One Mind, Two Languages: Bilingual Language Processing. Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, pp. 84–116.Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, Carol and Jake, Janice (2009). ‘A universal model of code-switching and bilingual language processing’, in Bullock, Barbara and Toribio, Almeida Jacqueline (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-Switching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 336–57.Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, Carol and Jake, Janice (2017). ‘Revisiting the 4-M model: codeswitching and morpheme election at the abstract level’, International Journal of Bilingualism 21(3): 340–66.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana, Sankoff, David and Miller, Christopher (1988). ‘The social correlates and linguistic processes of lexical borrowing and assimilation’, Linguistics 26: 47–104.Google Scholar
Pullum, Geoffrey K. and Huddleston, Rodney (2002). ‘Prepositions and prepositional phrases’, in Huddleston, Rodney and Pullum, Geoffrey K. (eds.), The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ross, Malcom (2001). ‘Contact-induced change in Oceanic languages in North-West Melanesia’, in Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. and Dixon, R. M. W. (eds.), Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Genetic Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 134–66.Google Scholar
Simango, Silvester Ron (2011). ‘When English meets isiXhosa in the clause: an exploration into the grammar of codeswitching’, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 29: 127–34.Google Scholar
Simango, Silvester Ron (2015). ‘“Amaphi ama-subject eniwa-enjoy-ayo esikolweni?”: language practices among bilingual learners in the Eastern Cape’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 234: 77–91.Google Scholar
Thomason, Sarah Grey and Kaufman, Terrence (1988). Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Weinreich, Uriel (1968). Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×