Afrikaans, American and British Models for South African English Lexicography: Racial Label Usage

Abstract

This article examines the treabnent of racial labels in monolingual English dictionaries of South Africa. Considering past controversies regarding racist language in Afrikaans dictionaries and considering the. changing role of English in democratic South Africa, we can expect that English dictionaries will be more carefully scrutinized in future for potential offence. With the boom in the South African lexicography industry, now is a prime time to reflect on the issues involved and suggest courses of action. This article places South African English dictionary traditions in a national and international context, by comparing the traditions and the roles of the languages in Afrikaans, British and American lexicographical traditions. While South African English lexicography is rooted in the British tradition, its possible evolution on the American model is demonstrated, and thus the role of the dictionary in a postcolonial community is briefly discussed.

The Language of Ethnic Conflict in English Online Lexicography: Ethnophaulisms in "powered by Oxford" Lexico.com

“…Going back to the great academic interest the topic has attracted in more general terms, a prime example of the heterogeneity of the literature is the wide range of labels scholars have used to term the phenomenon under scrutiny since the late 20th century. Such labels include "terms for racial abuse" (Burchfield 1980), "people names" or "ethnonyms" (Rader 1989), "words offensive to groups" (McCluskey 1989), "racial labels" (Murphy 1991(Murphy , 1997(Murphy , 1998, "the language of racism" or "racist language" (Hauptfleisch 1993;Krishnamurthy 1996), "derogatory words for nationality and for a racial or cultural group" (Norri 2000), "racial slurs" (Himma 2002), "taboo words" (Wachal 2002), "offensive language" or "offensive items" (Coffey 2010;Schutz 2002), "ethnocentrism" (Benson 2001), "ethnic slurs" or "ethnic epithets" (Croom 2015;Henderson 2003;Pullum 2018), "bad language words" (Pinnavaia 2014), "ethnocentricity" (Moon 2014), "insulting nationality words" (Nissinen 2015), and "ethnicity terms" (Žugić and Vuković-Stamatović 2021), among others. Nevertheless, as Filmer (2011: 21-25) argues, "whichever term we use to denote ethnophaulisms", they "are the linguistic manifestation of one culture's attitudes to the other", and, as such, they evidence the language of intercultural or ethnic conflict, which is the focus of this research.…”