Uses and functions of English in Namibia's multiethnic settings

Abstract

In a context where new English varieties from the Outer Circle have been receiving increasing attention, I propose to outline a descriptive approach to their uses and functions on the basis of their patterns of co-occurrence with local languages across intra and inter-ethnic boundaries. The case study I offer is Namibia, a multiethnic and multilingual African country where English has been the sole official language since 1990 without having had much local history prior to that date. The general question that I pose is to what extent and how English is used in informal interactions in Namibia. Considering Namibia's ethnolinguistic diversity as well as the locally widespread practice of code-switching, the questions I more specifically ask are: What are the patterns of code-switching with which English finds itself associated both within and across Namibia's inter-ethnic boundaries, and how can they be characterized in terms of social function? On the basis of a corpus of intra-and inter-ethnic interactions involving a range of Namibian ethnicities, I show evidence of a continuum of linguistic usage ranging from different patterns of code-switching involving English and local languages to more or less monolingual English varieties. I finally place that evidence within the perspective of new Englishes theory, emphasizing the possible relevance of code-switching patterns to the emergence of indigenized English varieties in general, and of an indigenized Namibian variety in particular. * F.W.O./V.

Contact and Innovation in New Englishes: Ethnic Neutrality in Namibianfaceandgoat

“…Each participant was administered a reading task, arguably the most effective medium of systematic L2-data collection where spontaneous speech is marked by codeswitching (Stell 2014(Stell , 2019. First came a reading task in the informant's L1 (see Table 1), which involved a list of common words (eighty Afrikaans items, fifteen to twenty items in each indigenous language), rather than sentences, which may have been hard for the informants to read as none of the non-Afrikaners were exposed to their L1s as a school subject.…”

“…In the decade preceding independence, the population groups most familiar with English were the whites, followed by the Caprivians, Basters, and (Cape) Coloureds (Prinsloo et al 1982). In 1990, the SWAPO government made English Namibia’s only official language and main medium of instruction at the expense of Afrikaans, which was dismissed as a “colonial language.” Since then, English has been increasingly performing lingua franca functions that had been previously performed by Afrikaans (Stell 2014; Stell & Groenewald 2016). Looking at Namibian English vowel systems, Stell (forthcoming) argues that Afrikaners and Coloureds still partly orient towards White South African English (“WSAfE”) models while Blacks are developing an autonomous variety possibly marked by indigenous L1 vowel systems.…”

Multilingualism from Manuscript to 3D

“…This may be due to the fact that English is the sole official language of Namibia and thus enjoys a high degree of overt prestige (cf. Stell andGroenewald 2016: 1129).…”

Extending the Scope of World Englishes: Interactions across Englishes in Post-Protectorates and at the Grassroots

“…Kamwendo (2003) off ers a very brief discussion of the use of English in Malawi. Stell (2014) is on uses and functions of English in Namibia, which has also received considerable attention by Buschfeld and Kautzsch (2014), and Schr ö der and Kautzsch (2016). Both Ochieng (2015), and Mohr and Ochieng (2017) discuss the status of English in Tanzania, the latter with a focus on education.…”