When natives became Africans: A historical sociolinguistic study of semantic change in colonial discourse

Abstract

The word native is a key term in nineteenth-century British colonial administrative vocabulary. The question is how it comes to be central to the classification of indigenous subjects in Britain’s southern African possessions in the early twentieth century, and how the word is appropriated by colonial citizens to designate the race of indigenous subjects. To answer the question, I construct a semasiological history of native as a word that has to do with the identification of a person with a place by birth, by residence or by citizenship. I track the manner in which speakers invest old words with new meanings in specific settings and differentiate among them in different domains. In the case of native, a signal keyword is recruited to do particular work in several contemporaneous discourses which take different ideological directions as the nature of the involvement of their speakers changes. The result is a particularly complicated word history, and one which offers a clue to the ways in which colonial rhetoric is domesticated in specific settings at the very same time as the colonising power eschews it in the process of divesting itself of its colonies.

Cognitive Sociolinguistic Variation in the Old Bailey Voices Corpus: The Case for a New Concept‐Led Framework

“…Studies focused on lexical semantics have shown that a meaningful correlation exists between word usage and key sociolinguistic categories, such as geographical region (Geeraerts et al. 1994), demographics (Robinson 2010, 2011), ideology (Fitzmaurice 2017), stance (Sandow & Robinson 2018). In this research, we discover underlying macro‐patterns of thinking operating across different communities of speakers, which are manifested through entire concepts, not just individual words.…”