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Language Variation and Ethnicity: Gramnmatical variation and Code-Switching in the Afrikaans Speech Community

Book - Book

This book illustrates 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 of the processes shaping ethnicity. Two areas of language variation come into focus, namely Afrikaans morpho-syntax 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.
Series: Schriften zur Afrikanistik
Number of pages: 297
ISBN:3-631-62165-5
Publication year:2011
Keywords:Sociolinguistics, Afrikaans, Ethnciity