Comparability of the Black-White Divide in the American Speech Community and the Coloured-White Divide in the Afrikaans Speech Community

Abstract

This article attempts to place the discussion on the relationship between African American and European American vernacular Englishes within a broader context involving another speech community split along ethnic lines, namely South Africa's Afrikaans speakers. It specifically attempts to compare observations on the coloured-white linguistic divide within South Africa's Afrikaans speech community with those made on the black-white linguistic divide in the Uni ted States, wi th the aim of shedding light on the correl ati on between ethnicity and language variation. The article first presents ethnicity and its social and linguistic correlates, drawing on literature on AA(V)E and South Africa. It then identifies the social and linguistic specificities of the American English and Afrikaans speech communities. After presenting a range of grammatical variables and their comparability across both speech communities, it provides an overview first of the various trends of grammatical variation from a mainly variationist perspective, then of Afrikaans-English code-switching, which is treated as a phenomenon that correlates with grammatical variation. It finally attempts to answer the general question whether the U.S. black-white linguistic divide in South Africa's Afrikaans speech community can be referred to as complementary in the study of ethnicity and language variation.

Multi-word echoes of English: Visible vs. invisible Anglicisms in Danish

“…Hultgren 2016). 7 This type of codeswitching is commonly found in diglossic societies, when speakers mix acrolect content words with basilect function words (see Myers-Scotton 1993, Stell 2012and Gottlieb 2020b for the English impact on Afrikaans).…”