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Chapter 5 - Regionality in South African English

from I - A Framework for English in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2019

By
Deon du Plessis ,
Ian Bekker  and
Raymond Hickey
Edited by
Raymond Hickey
Raymond Hickey
Affiliation:
Universität Duisburg–Essen
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Summary

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.

Keywords

South African EnglishregionalityregionalismsShort Front Vowel ShiftsociophoneticsDurbanJohannesburgCape Townvowel quality
Type
Chapter
Information
English in Multilingual South Africa
The Linguistics of Contact and Change
 , pp. 74 - 100
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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