J. M. Coetzee has several points of contact with translation: as a translator, as a translated author, and as a critic and scholar. After discussing Coetzee’s relationship to languages and language learning, this chapter briefly analyses two of Coetzee’s translations from Afrikaans, of The Expedition to the Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenström and of ‘Eden’ by Ina Rousseau, before reflecting on Coetzee’s views of translation expressed directly in ‘Working with Translators’ and indirectly in sections of Diary of a Bad Year as well as Coetzee’s occasional writings on Samuel Beckett. The chapter finishes with a consideration of the impact of translation on Coetzee’s prose style.

In this chapter, using historical records and academic commentaries and research, we trace language contact in Cape Town from as far back as 400 CE. We detail how people indigenous to the area, as well as migrants from the rest of Africa and abroad, adapted their speech for social, political and economic reasons, with the result that Dutch, and later Afrikaans and English, gained prominence. After this diachronic account, we focus on two contemporary speech communities in Cape Town, and through interviews and participant observations confirm that while English is considered a prestige language and the key to future success, people still speak vernacular varieties of their own languages and of English. Examination of the linguistic landscape of the city in a number of research articles shows that English (some of it non-standard) is used far more widely in signage than African languages, which are used primarily for stylistic and affective reasons. Finally, we use research into hip-hop and rap performances in the city to argue that in this domain of music, local languages and mixed codes are preferred over 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 examines the evidence of language shifts to English in post-apartheid South Africa. We first present a brief overview of the language situation in South Africa and offer a review of the literature on language shift. A number of scholars have expressed concern that the maintenance of language diversity in South Africa is threatened by the dominance of English in schooling and the economy. However, other studies find that despite an increased use of English, mother-tongue languages have retained their cultural value as languages of identification. Moreover, recent quantitative work shows that among Africans the increased use of English is associated primarily with an increase in bilingualism rather than with the displacement of Bantu languages by English. We add to this literature with an analysis of Population Census data from 1996 to 2011 to investigate possible language shift from Afrikaans to English, particularly among Coloureds. We show that, despite a small decline in the use of Afrikaans as L1 and a corresponding rise in the use of English, the overall use of Afrikaans increased, because of the considerable growth in English–Afrikaans bilingualism.

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.