Ethnicity and Language Variation

Download or read book Ethnicity and Language Variation written by Gerald Stell and published by Schriften zur Afrikanistik / Research in African Studies. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the linguistic reflection of ethnicity using as an illustration informal speech patterns in the bi-ethnic Afrikaans speech community. Its theoretical outlook is based on variationist studies and discourse studies on the processes shaping ethnicity. Two areas of language variation come into focus, namely Afrikaans morphosyntax and Afrikaans-English code-switching. Coloured and White speech norms are quantitatively reconstructed on the basis of a corpus of informal speech. This forms the point of departure for a qualitative reconstruction of strategies of ethnic identity negotiation. It is shown that quantifiable trends of linguistic convergence are not incompatible with enduring ethnic differentiation in speech norms.