Rajend  Mesthrie 

• PhD
• University of Cape Town

This article focuses on the fraught relation between xenophobia and language use and learning in the South African sociolinguistic context. It begins with the issue of labelling and the linguistic drawing of boundaries that speak to the phenomena of “othering” and xenophobia. It then proceeds to aspects of diasporic communication and identity negot...

Este artigo revisa pesquisas sobre o uso da língua entre migrantes transnacionais da África do Sul desde 1990, tomando isso como um ponto de partida conveniente como o ano do primeiro anúncio oficial da renúncia ao apartheid, levando ao seu desmantelamento legal em 1994. Considerando que a África do Sul havia incentivado a migração europeia para o...

The ways in which young people use language provides fascinating insights into language practice and contact. Written by a team of key scholars in the field, this book describes and theorises 'male, in-group, street-aligned, youth language practice' in urban centres in Africa, exploring the creative use of language, and its function in peer sociali...

This paper has two purposes. Firstly, it provides a bird’s eye view of the characteristics of a variety of Gujarati in diaspora, viz. that spoken in Cape Town, South Africa for almost 150 years. Secondly it focusses on one notable feature, viz. the prominence of retroflexes over dentals, and connects this with other dialects of Gujarati in India an...

This chapter revisits the Linguistic Survey of India (Sir George Grierson, ed. 1903–28, eleven volumes in nineteen parts) in the context of its times, as well as from the hindsights of colonial linguistics. It reviews the motivation for the project, its intentions and practices, and adopts a critical perspective in also considering its interface wi...

This chapter assesses the role of language contact in the development of African Englishes. It concurs with most previous writing that contact is a major ingredient in the formation of Sub‐Saharan English (SSE). Substrate influence is clearly discernible in SSE phonetics and phonology. The chapter discusses the characteristics of vowel systems in S...

This article unlocks the complex indexicalities pertaining to names in a multilayered diasporic field, one in which descendants from different ancestral areas of a former homeland (India) have merged loosely into a new community (in South Africa). The focus falls on large-scale innovations in officially registered personal names over a period of 15...

The paper will deal with the full implications of colonialism and its aftermath in coming to terms with the phenomena of world Englishes. Worldwide movements have brought to the fore the persistence of post‐colonial hierarchies, inequalities and forms of domination well beyond the pre‐colonial and colonial contexts that gave rise to them. South Afr...

Fanakalo pidgin rose to prominence when it was selected for use as the lingua franca of the highly multilingual mines of South Africa. This article examines the properties of Fanakalo as a mining language, in contrast to its uses on farms, suburban households and in urban employment. Fanakalo has evolved a special register of technical terms pertai...

The present volume brings together leading scholars studying language change from a variety of sociolinguistic perspectives, complementing and enriching the existing literature by providing readers with a kaleidoscopic perspective of aspects of change in English from around 1700 until the present day. The volume presents a collection of in-depth st...

This tribute to the work of Braj B. Kachru covers three themes. First, I present an overview of Kachru's career and contribution to the field of world Englishes (WE) and language contact. In the second and main section I present an overview of Indian English – Language and culture, a booklet in the Lonely Planet language products series from 1968 (...

This article continues the initial documentary work on South African Kokni begun in Mesthrie, Kulkarni-Joshi and Paradkar (2016). The language (known as Konkani in India) has been in existence for over 125 years in South Africa, with Cape Town as its main base. We characterise the extent to which the language is still used and the social circumstan...

Although the historical linguistics of English in Africa is not a heavily studied area, this overview attempts to show that it is not without considerable interest in its own right. Moreover, for two L1 varieties comparisons with similar varieties outside the continent can be historically illuminating. The first is White South African English, for...

In this paper we present an overview of the morphosyntactic features of Cape Flats English, a variety that evolved among people formerly classified “coloured” in South Africa, as distinct from black and white groupings. We do so within the framework provided by Kortmann and Lunkenheimer (2012) in their comprehensive comparison of 235 morphosyntacti...

This article analyzes the sociophonetic dynamics of the acquisition of a prestige variety of English in post-apartheid South Africa. New economic and educational opportunities have seen the rapid growth of a Black middle class, whose younger members have increasingly come into contact with what used to be '(L1) White South African English’. The art...

Providing a contemporary and comprehensive look at the topical area of areal linguistics, this book looks systematically at different regions of the world whilst presenting a focussed and informed overview of the theory behind research into areal linguistics and language contact. The topicality of areal linguistics is thoroughly documented by a wea...

This chapter addresses how the history of English as a linguistic topic has been taught in one South African university. The author focuses on the traditional Old-Middle-Modern English trichotomy as well as colonial and postcolonial synchronic varieties. Subsequent to a curricular shift from historical to applied linguistics in English departments,...

Recent sociophonetic research has demonstrated how the effects of post-apartheid desegregation at schools upon the social networks of young middle-class South Africans have fostered major changes in South African English. In particular, middle-class speakers of Black, Coloured and Indian groups show different degrees of accommodation to the norms o...

When Neville Alexander died in 2012, aged 75, after a short battle against cancer, South Africa lost its leading linguistic activist. It also lost an independent political thinker, one who had been incarcerated on Robben Island for 10 years, between 1964 and 1974, interacting there with Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Eddie Daniels a...

This article offers a comparison of the history of English in India and South Africa, with special reference to its rise as a second language. As far as external history is concerned both territories show investment in a language whose use has long outlasted the colonial era, despite the concerns of leaders and scholars with a pro-indigenous langua...

This paper provides the beginnings of a pan-South African English dialectology, characterizing five cities (Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Kimberley, Johannesburg, and Durban) and four ethnicities (Black, Colored, Indian, and White), via a single vowel, BATH (or /ɑ:/). From interviews with 200 selected speakers, 5553 tokens were subjected to acoustic a...

This two-part volume provides a collection of 27 linguistic studies and contributions that shed light on the evolution of different Englishes world-wide (varieties, learner Englishes, dialects, creoles) from a broad spectrum of different perspectives, including both synchronic and diachronic approaches. What makes the volume unique is that it is th...

Diasporic populations offer unique opportunities for the study of language variation and change. This volume is the first collection of sociolinguistic studies of English use across the historically complex and widely dispersed Indian diaspora. The contributions describe particular sociohistorical contexts (the UK, Fiji, South Africa, Singapore, an...

This chapter explores the potential of phonetic and sociophonetic research in characterising varieties of English in the Indian diaspora, using South African Indian English (SAIE) as a focal point. We first identify key phonetic features that lend themselves to such comparative study. In this regard we note that ret-roflexes are recessive in SAIE,...

This paper examines the use of “tsotsitaals” that use English as a base language, viz. Surfspeak used mainly by White surfing subcultures in Cape Town, and the unnamed variety characteristic of (mainly) young Indian and coloured males in Durban. Examples from written sources are used to characterise the varieties and their status. Attention is paid...

This paper is part of a larger project covering South African English dialectology via five cities (Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Kimberley, Johannesburg and Durban) and four ethnicities (Whites, Black, Coloured and Indian), using a single vowel to explore and exemplify regional and ethnic similarities and differences. For reasons of space only the Wh...

This paper is part of a larger project covering South African English dialectology via five cities (Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Kimberley, Johannesburg and Durban) and four ethnicities (Whites, Black, Coloured and Indian), using a single vowel to explore and exemplify regional and ethnic similarities and differences. For reasons of space only the Wh...

This paper reflects on the recently published Dictionary of South African Indian English (Mesthrie, 2010, henceforth DSAIE) in terms of the decisions that have to be made over content in a New English variety. 'New English' is used in the commonly accepted sense of a variety that has arisen as a second language in a multilingual context, mainly und...

The collection of South African urban language phenomena called Tsotsitaal, Scamtho, Ringas (in short ‘Tsotsitaals’) etc, have been described differently as code-switching, mixed languages, or essentially slang vocabulary. These descriptions however, fail to acknowledge the centrality of performance to these phenomena. Tsotsitaals draw on extra-lin...

This paper examines the status of an informal urban variety in Cape Town known as Tsotsitaal. Similar varieties, going by a plethora of names (Flaaitaal, Iscamtho, Ringas) have been described in other South African cities, especially Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban (see also Sheng in Kenyan cities). This paper seeks to describe the essential char...

This handbook takes stock of recent advances in the history of English, the most studied language in the field of diachronic linguistics. Not only does ample and invaluable data exist due to English’s status as a global language, but the availability of large electronic corpora has also allowed historical linguists to analyze more of this data than...

English is an important part of the linguistic landscape of Africa, and a binding force at the level of transnational communication, especially in the sub-Saharan region.

This paper presents information on the regional characteristics of two of South Africa's five major varieties of English: viz. those of its Coloured and Indian communities in five cities: Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Kimberley. It proposes that as far as the variable (t) is concerned, and by extension (d), these two “interio...

Although the historical linguistics of English in Africa is not a heavily studied area, this overview attempts to show that it is not without considerable interest in its own right. Moreover, for two L1 varieties comparisons with similar varieties outside the continent can be historically illuminating. The first is White South African English, for...

In this paper, I propose some syntactic tendencies by which New Englishes can be better characterised from an internal and a comparative perspective, using Black South African English (BSAE) as a case study and focal point. Many descriptions of New Englishes have simply taken the form of lists of features. "Feature" in New English Studies (as in tr...

Race: A Conceptual OverviewEthnicityRace, Ethnicity and ‘Color’Ethnic Dialects and Social NetworksCasteReligion and LanguageConclusion References

Editorial: Whose standard is it anyway? - Volume 27 Issue 4 - Kingsley Bolton, David Graddol, Rajend Mesthrie

The South African Concise Oxford Dictionary (henceforth SACOD) is a South Af-rican version of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the first time that this particular hybrid has been prepared. It is testimony to the enduring success of the work of the Dictionary Unit for South African English at Rhodes University, headed by teams that included Jean and W...

The South African Concise Oxford Dictionary (henceforth SACOD) is a South Af-rican version of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the first time that this particular hybrid has been prepared. It is testimony to the enduring success of the work of the Dictionary Unit for South African English at Rhodes University, headed by teams that included Jean and W...

In this paper I examine arguments for and against the concept of the native speaker in linguistics. My focus is mainly on new varieties of English that have stabilized in parts of the former British Empire, with main exemplification from Indian English and its bilingual speakers as well three varieties that have undergone or are undergoing language...

Zero tolerance of prescriptivism? - Volume 26 Issue 2 - Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Rajend Mesthrie

Background to Anglo-African ContactContact versus Non-Contact EffectsEffects of Contact in SSE PhonologyContact and SSE SyntaxConclusion References

This paper examines the degree of sociolinguistic change in the English of young middle-class South Africans of different ethnic backgrounds in relation to new post-apartheid opportunities and friendships. Once tightly controlled, social networks of young people of middle-class background are now deracialising. The paper examines whether young peop...

This chapter deals with an aspect of the spread of English as a second language and its stabilization in some communities in relation to issues pertaining to ethnicity. The adoption of English as an L1 does not necessarily confer ‘English’ status or consciousness amongst speakers. This paradox can be clarified by examining the coexistence of differ...

As English Today notches up a century, it's high time to acknowledge Tom McArthur's inimitable contribution to the study of English worldwide. Tom McArthur's contribution to English language studies has been immense, and has had a powerful impact at a number of levels. Tom started his life as an educator, gaining crucial exposure to English across...

The first edition of Kenkyusha's New English-Japanese Dictionary, published in 1960, had back mirror with the meaning of 'rear-view mirror', which was blamed as an error by many people. It was a typical Japanese English. But nowadays we find some Japanese English accepted as loan words into English. This paper investigates some of the features refl...

This article examines five key areas of grammar which differentiate the pidgin, Fanakalo from L2 learner varieties of its lexifiers, Zulu and to a lesser extent, Xhosa. Taking Fanakalo as the descriptive starting point, these areas are (a) the article lo; (b) the preposition lapha; (c) the free pronouns mina 'I', wena 'you' etc.; (d) the locative c...

Language shift, the process by which a second language ousts a community's first language as the everyday vernacular, almost inevitably throws up a vast array of morpho-syntactic and phonetic variety in the new vernacular. This paper seeks to ascertain what choices the first post-shift generation of child learners makes from such an array of compet...

This paper provides a sociolinguistic (rather than an applied linguistic or political) appraisal of policy-related language developments in South Africa, with a main focus on recent trends in applied linguistic writing on the subject. The paper first briefly summarises the trends leading to the constitutional ideals and their modifications. Thereaf...

From Beowulf to Bollywood - Volume 25 Issue 3 - Kingsley Bolton, David Graddol, Rajend Mesthrie

A report on an interdisciplinary e-course experiment on language, literature and culture in the Indian Diaspora. One of the rich potentials of the World Wide Web is to enable international and interdisciplinary projects by utilizing e-learning technologies. Further, contemporary students are used to structuring much of their public and private life...

From Africa to Australia by train and plane - Volume 25 Issue 2 - Kingsley Bolton, David Graddol, Rajend Mesthrie

From English worldwide to graveyard humour - Volume 25 Issue 1 - Kingsley Bolton, David Graddol, Rajend Mesthrie

World Englishes is a vibrant research field that has attracted scholars from many different linguistic subdisciplines. Emphasizing the common ground of all research on World Englishes, the 22 articles in this collected volume, selected from more than a hundred papers presented at the 2007 conference of the International Association for World Englis...

About the book: The Routledge Companion to English Language Studies is an accessible guide to the major topics, debates and issues in English Language Studies. This authoritative collection includes entries written by well-known language specialists from a diverse range of backgrounds who examine and explain established knowledge and recent develop...

This issue presents a selection of articles on English in various contexts and settings, with a significant focus on education in the first four. Susan Van Rooy describes the language experiences of South Korean academics and their families in a small town in South Africa, and the consequences of their stay abroad for their English language profici...

This paper critically examines one particular issue against the background of changes in South Africa's higher education system consequent upon the advent of a non-racial democracy – the possibility of implementing multilingual instructional polices that include indigenous African languages in its universities. Currently, a great deal of applied li...

This article reflects on the spread of English in South Africa, especially in the wake of the large-scale changes following the collapse of apartheid in the early 1990s. These changes allowed freer mixing of young South Africans of all backgrounds than had been hitherto possible in a segregated society. In particular, schools formerly reserved for...

Introduction In a survey of South Asian diaspora, it is convenient to identify three focal periods and types of emigration, which I label the first, second, and third diasporas. The first diaspora, about which little is known, and even less of the languages involved saw Indians traveling to places in Asia, Africa, and Europe. These movements were v...

What is Sociolinguistics?Variation: Dialect, Style, Practice, ChangeInteractionGender, Ethnicity, and NetworkMultilingualism and Language ContactSociolinguistic Applications in EducationConclusion

Starts with an excerpt from Braj B. Kachru, The sacred cows of English (ET16, 1988). The ‘Sacred Cows’ article has been a seminal piece for many reasons. It introduced the world to Braj's famous ‘Three Circles of English’ model. At roughly the same time, in the late 1980s, three pioneers in the field which was then known as ‘English as a World Lang...

This is the first issue of ET in the ‘post-McArthur era’, edited by a new team, that happily still includes Tom. In preparing this issue, the new members of the squad became even more aware of Tom's editorial skills, the effort he has put into making ET succeed over 23 years and his general lightness of touch. It is entirely appropriate that this f...

IntroductionEarly Contact HistorySailorsSettlers and TradersMissionariesSoldiersTeachersConclusion

The spread of English around the world has been and continues to be both rapid and unpredictable. World Englishes: The Study of New Linguistic Varieties deals with this inescapable result of colonisation and globalisation from a social and linguistic perspective. The main focus of the book is on the second-language varieties of English that have de...

This article provides a sociolinguistic overview of Tamil, the language that once had the greatest number of speakers amongst the Indian South Africans. It ocuses on the following four aspects of the life cycle of the language in South Africa: (a) origins and demography, (b) dialect features, (c) changes arising out of contact with South African la...

Raymond Hickey (ed.), Legacies of Colonial English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp xx, 713. Hb. £90. This copious volume deals with the development of English at various overseas locations (the “New World,” the Southern Hemisphere, and Asia) during the heyday of British colonialism between the early 17th and late 19th centuries. Th...

This case study of the English of early missionaries operating in South Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century serves three main functions. Firstly, it characterizes the interlanguages of some German and Dutch missionaries, which are interesting in their own. right, historically and theoretically. Secondly, it points out the disparity b...

South African Indian English (SAIE) refers to a stabilised L1 variety of New English that is spoken by descendants of Indian immigrants who came to work mainly in the sugar plantations of Natal in South Africa. Although the first immigrants had no knowledge of English, it had become the lingua franca amongst a majority of Indians by the 1950s. Sinc...

The aim of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, it reports on the lexical characteristics of a hitherto little studied ‘New English’ variety—South African Indian English. It points to lexical affinities with, and divergences from, other varieties of English in South Africa, at least one of which has been well studied in terms of its lexis. It also focu...

This paper is a demographic and dialectological study of spoken Tamil in South Africa. It is based on fieldwork conducted in KwaZulu-Natal (in Durban, Pietermaritzburg and Umkomaas) between 1990 and 1992. It provides information about Tamil speakers brought from the Madras Presidency to South Africa in the period 1860–1911. The paper aims to charac...

The field of language in society is a broad one that focuses on the use of language in its social contexts. These contexts may be physical (as in the study of domain-related registers or styles of language), interactional (as in the study of the dialogic nature of speech), or social (pertaining to characteristics of individuals or groups along line...

This is the eleventh volume in the Blackwell series “Handbooks in Linguistics.” Of the previous ten, one was devoted to general sociolinguistics (Coulmas 1997), making this the first in the series to deal with a specific branch of sociolinguistics. For many scholars, variation theory (including the study of change in progress) is the heartland of s...

  Traditional histories of English (e.g., Baugh and Cable, 1993) present a mostly unilinear account of the language that privileges the standard in Britain and to a lesser extent, the US. Most other varieties (e.g., in Australia, Nigeria or India) are treated as appendages to this history, of interest mainly for their lexical innovations. At the sa...

This paper offers a unified account of the syntactic “deviations” found in a second language variety of English, viz. Black South African English (BlSAfE). Most writing on the topic has been content to supply lists of non-standard features which are thought to be diagnostic of the variety. This paper aims to characterise the syntax of the variety v...