Grammaticale variatie in het informele gesproken Afrikaans: standaardisatie ‘from above’ en standaardisatie ‘from belo

Afrikaans as a prescriptive variety has recently been losing much visibility. This evolution raises the question whether Afrikaans speakers still use the linguistic features of prescriptive Standard Afrikaans as points of reference in their actual spoken usage. If standardization 'from above' has been interrupted as a result of the new sociolinguistic settings in South Africa and Namibia, is there nonetheless evidence of a norm of common actual usage brought about by a dynamic of standardization 'from below'? To answer this question, a corpus of informal speech data has been collected among three distinct age cohorts of White and Coloured speakers sampled across South Africa and Namibia. Our selection of variables has been determined by the existence of strong and well-documented prescriptive models, which, in the case of Afrikaans, are mostly available in the areas of morphology and syntax. Our findings show that both standardization 'from above' and 'from below' are operating in our corpus, but that these processes often expose ethnic and geographic divisions within the Afrikaans speech community. The samples closest to prescriptive Afrikaans are invariably the White ones. The distribution of individual linguistic variables reveals that Coloureds may sometimes unilaterally converge towards or diverge from White usage, while in other individual cases mutual convergence away from prescriptive Afrikaans is taking place between Coloureds and Whites. Since this latter tendency is the one that emerges as dominant in our analysis, there may be a question of a dynamic of grammatical 'deformalization' acting as an agent of greater linguistic homogeneity across the Afrikaans speech community.

Jaar van publicatie:2010

Trefwoorden:Sociolinguistics, Standardization, Afrikaans