This chapter discusses the feature pool of the different tsotsitaals in terms of not just vocabulary, but morphology and especially syntax. To answer these contact-related questions, I argue that standard language, non-standard urban varieties and youth language practices (tsotsitaals) need to be studied together as a package for their commonalities, differences and the ways in which they relate to each other. I do this partly by summarising early South African approaches and assessing how they have been improved by attention being given to the urban varieties, as spoken by a wider community than just adolescent and young males in a particular in-group or informal mode. I reanalyse two studies of isiZulu-based tsotsitaal of the Johannesburg area by Ngwenya (1995) and Gunnink (2014), concluding that this tsotsitaal does not have an independent syntax from the urban variety of isiZulu.

This chapter provides a brief, non-technical introduction to the strictly linguistic aspects of the evolution of World Englishes: the reasons for the fact that New Englishes have developed distinctive forms of their own, and the processes that have brought these new properties about. These speech forms and habits are shown to be products of language contact situations, with features of indigenous languages taken over into local forms of English, and an interplay of language-internal (such as effects of cognition, tendencies towards simplicity, regularity, or assigning a functional load to language forms) and extralinguistic factors (including demographic proportions, power relationships, prestige and social attitudes and identities). Secondly, it is shown that World Englishes share not only such evolutionary trajectories but also specific forms and features on the levels of vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar (such as reduced or modified vowel and sound systems, semantic shifting and typical word-formation processes, or characteristic grammatical innovations, often starting out at the interface between lexis and grammar). All linguistic forms brought into a contact situation constitute a "pool" of linguistic options, of which some then are successfully selected to become elements of a newly-emerging dialect of English.