Children add more information to their utterances by packing more material into a single clause. They can specify roles, modify nouns with adjectives and verbs with added locatives and adverbs. They can add demonstratives (those) and quantifiers (many) to nouns, and make clearer what they are referring to. Young children’s early constructions tend to mirror parental usage, just as their lexical choices do. They follow preferred argument structure and place given information in the Agent slot of transitive verbs, and keep the Object slot of transitives and the Subject slot of intransitives for new information. They may omit given information at this stage and only later add the relevant pronoun subjects. In both questions and negations, they take time to master the use of auxiliary verbs and rely on fixed “frames” for some time as they learn the meaning of each wh- question word. Children also take time in learning how different perspectives can be marked within the clause, with choices of causative, location, or voice alternations. Here children must learn the options verb by verb.

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.