book review

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Forwarded from LINGUIST List 14.1596

Mesthrie, Rajend, ed. (2002) Language in South Africa, Cambridge
University Press.

Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-176.html

Peter Unseth, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics and SIL
International

In the tradition of ''Language in Canada'' and ''Language in
Australia'', (and the much earlier East African series,
e.g. ''Language in Ethiopia''), this book describes broad patterns of
language distribution, use, and policy, along with a specific
descriptions of narrower topics.

At the outset, this book must be distinguished from Webb's 2002 book
with an identical main title, but subtitled ''The Role of Language in
National Transformation, Reconstruction and Development'' announced at
http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-2683.html and which I
reviewed in http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-452.html. The two
books have surprisingly little overlap. Mesthrie's is broader, while
Webb's is more concerned with policy, giving background, proposals,
and rationale. Most of the papers in this volume are revised and
updated from Mesthrie (1995), now happily available to a broader
market.

1. South Africa: a sociolinguistic overview, by Mesthrie
This is, as expected, a broad overview of sociolinguistics in South
Africa (SA), with a strong historical flavor. The current situation is
very fluid, policy and practice still in fluctuation amid
experimentation.

2. The Khoesan languages, by Traill
Traill summarizes the earlier distribution of Khoesan (''Bushmen'')
languages in SA, now nearly extinct there, though they left clear
traces in Zulu and Xhosa and Afrikaans. Bantu languages borrowed their
clicks, a possible scenario for this presented by Herbert in chapter
15. He relates several cases of bilingualism and language death.

3. The Bantu languages: socio-historical perspectives, by Herbert &
Dailey

They give a broad review of Bantu classifications and proposed
migrations, useful for non-specialists. For some of the Bantu
languages of SA, they propose that contact and language shift account
for similarities, rather than genetic relationship.

There are nine Bantu languages officially recognized in SA. However,
many scholars argue that these speech forms do not represent nine
separate speech communities, each speaking relatively standardized
speech forms. Some of these languages are the result of outsiders'
classifications and/or selection as standards.

4. Afrikaans: considering origins, by Roberge
There is still no unanimity on understanding the processes by which
Afrikaans arose, a topic in which racial presuppositions sometimes
conflict with the data. Clearly it has much Dutch structure, but it
arose in a situation including Khoekhoe, Bantu, non-Dutch Europeans,
and slaves, often living in dispersed farms, with no concentrated
communities. (The slaves were from all over - Benin to Indonesia -
therefore did not bring a shared linguistic heritage.) Modern
Afrikaans reflects the Eastern variety, from an area with a higher
proportion of Dutch settlers; so that standard Afrikaans is the
closest to European Dutch of the earlier varieties.

5. South African English, by Lass
Lass begins with an introduction to English dialectology, then
discusses present-day dialects of SAE, their users, and their social
significance. He discusses various phonetic patterns in detail,
identifying their users by region, social class, gender and ethnic
identity.

6. South African Sign Language: one language or many?, by Aarons and
Akach

Schools for the Deaf in SA were generally racially segregated, schools
for African Deaf divided by ''native language''. With combinations of
lip reading and a limited signing system, the Deaf were limited in
communicating across ''language'' lines.

They favor ''natural sign languages'', sign languages ''not trying to
represent English or Afrikaans''. Sign systems that try to depict such
a spoken language are promoted by non-Deaf, and therefore some see
more sign languages in SA.

Among the Deaf (esp. non-White), there is a growing sense of
community, less emphasis on ethnicity. However, many White Deaf still
see themselves as ''Afrikaans'' first, then ''Deaf''. The authors
claim this results in over-emphasis on inability to understand sign
language across racial lines. The authors make no specific claim that
there is now a single sign language in SA, but rather write of the
growing sense of unity among the Deaf. Nowhere in the article do they
do anything but give assertions and anecdotal evidence to answer the
question in their subtitle.

This fascinating article can serve as an introduction to the
sociolinguistics of signed languages, a topic I had previously
overlooked.

7. German speakers in South Africa, by de Kadt
There are still a number of German speakers in SA, but the language is
strongest where there are fewest speakers, since these are in rural
isolated areas where small homogenous communities maintain the use of
German. The use of German is weakening, by intermarriage, increasing
bilingualism and outmigration.

8. Indian languages in South Africa, by Mesthrie
Many indentured workers were brought to SA from different parts of
India, speaking many languages. Mesthrie provides a brief discussion
of the use of Fanakalo pidgin by people of Indian origin, but I would
have appreciated more explanation of the languages used for wider
communication by the Indian communities in their early days in SA. His
discussion of koineisation and South African Bhojpuri is only part of
the puzzle.

The use of Indian language is declining, partially as a result of the
fact that the Indian communities have no common Indian language that
they can use for communication among themselves, with Tamil, Urdu, and
Hindi all having loyal, uncompromising followers.

9. Fanakalo: a pidgin in South Africa, by Adendorff
This article tries to do too much: discuss the origins of Fanakalo,
its current social significance, its grammatical structure, dialect
variation, and also compare it to other pidgins. The references should
help the reader who is interested in learning more on these
topics. The author points out the lexical richness of Fanakalo,
unusual in a pidgin. A snippet of ''Garden Fanakalo'' is given and its
structure is then compared with a much richer corpus of ''Mine
Fanakalo'', but the text of the ''Garden'' variety does not appear to
be from a person who knows any variety of Fanakalo well, judging by
the amount of pure English included.

Adendorff's hypothesis that Fanakalo developed in the interaction
between missionaries and Zulu speakers is sadly incompletely
explained.

10. Mutual lexical borrowing among some languages of southern Africa,
by Branford and Claughton
This article consists largely of lists of loans, with discussion of
why some words are more naturalized than others, and evidence for
secondary borrowing. It contains a tantalizingly brief discussion of
the process of standardizing Afrikaans; though now seen as the
language of whites, in the 18th century it had more non- white
speakers than white. They present evidence that English has borrowed
more from Bantu languages than Afrikaans has, a reflection of social
attitudes.

11. Code-switching, mixing and convergence in Cape Town, by McCormick
12. Code-switching in South African townships, by Slabbert and
Finlayson
Chapters 11 and 12 both describe speech communities rich in code-
switching, applying two different approaches. Both deal with matters
of identity, plus theoretical issues of code switching. Slabbert and
Finlayson have worked with Myers-Scotton, and this is reflected in
their approach, including a discussion of her Matrix Language Frame.
Their proposal that growing code-switching will offer an alternative
''possibility of creating multilingual programmes, advertisements,
brochures, political speeches, etc.'' seems unrealistic.

13. Intercultural miscommunication in South Africa, by Chick
The article focuses on how people from different places, eras, and
ethnic groups handle compliments. It gives evidence that different
groups in South Africa handle compliments differently, creating
misunderstanding in inter-group communications. There is evidence of
changed patterns in handling compliments since the end of apartheid.

14. Women's language of respect: isihlonipho sabafazi, by Finlayson
Finlayson describes speech behavior among Xhosa women in which a wife
must avoid words that contain the same syllables as found in the names
of her husband's family, a custom found elsewhere in SA. She provides
a useful description of the ways in which women follow these rules of
avoidance, including circumlocutions and an established parallel
vocabulary. Not surprisingly, urbanization has led to weakening of
this verbal avoidance.

15. The sociohistory of clicks in Southern Bantu, by Herbert
The clicks in the Khoesan languages of southern Africa are a set of
highly marked consonants. But their existence in the adjoining Bantu
languages is even more arresting. Clearly, they are the result of
contact, but there have been competing theories as to the
circumstances, such as the ''invading Bantu males''. Herbert points
out that Bantu languages that have borrowed clicks have not borrowed
other features of Khoesan phonology, e.g. word final consonants. The
borrowing of these clicks is not simply part of a broad pattern of
phonological influence, but a deliberate borrowing of a new type of
consonant. He finds the source of this in ''hlonipha'', (article 14).
Herbert believes that the adoption of these consonants into Bantu
languages allowed women to retain their original vocabulary,
substituting clicks for the original consonants.

16. The political economy of language shift: language and gendered
ethnicity in a Thonga community, by Herbert
The Thonga (Tonga/Tsonga/Gwamba/Ronga) live near the Mozambique/SA
border. Due to various sociolinguistic pressures (including
deportation to Mozambique to those who claimed Thonga identity), there
has been a pressure to identify themselves as Zulu. For over 100
years, Thonga men in SA have been speaking Zulu, while the women
continued speaking Thonga. Recently, women have begun shifting to
Zulu, fewer now officially claim to be Thonga. Thonga women have
deliberately been slower to switch than the men partially because they
have more privileges than in Zulu society.

Both of the following articles about varieties of English in South
Africa would have benefited from some explanation of how speakers of
the dialect in question relate to the standard South African English
and to each other.

17. From second language to first language: Indian South African English
(ISAE), by Mesthrie ISAE is not simply Indian English spoken in SA, rather
it developed in SA not in India. Sources included European teachers who
were not first language speakers, native speakers of English in SA, and
their own habits from Indian languages. Many of Indian descent (including
younger sibling, mothers, and grandparents) learned English from children
who learned it at school, so they learned it from sources of limited
proficiency.

18. Black South African English (BSAE), by de Klerk and Gough BSAE arose
from the environment where Black students were taught English mostly by
Black teachers who were not native speakers. As even more teachers are now
non- native speakers of English, and these have learned their English from
earlier generations of non-native speakers, the English norm among Black
South Africans is becoming more and more divergent from SAE. As with ISAE,
some of the patterns that distinguish BSAE are also found in other
Englishes around the world, some of the patterns of creolization coming
into play.

The three following articles form a subsection ''New urban codes'',
describing speech forms that include large amounts of borrowing and mixing
from both Indo-European and African languages, marking a high degree of
distinct identity, and having degrees of association with criminal gangs
and rebellion. However, each article is written separately with almost no
reference to the others, and readers are left with no clear understanding
of how much these speech forms overlap or differ, either in the minds of
the speakers or in the linguistic details.

19. The lexicon and sociolinguistic codes of the working- class
Afrikaans-speaking Cape Peninsula coloured community, by Stone Stone
describes how he has been systematically studying this dialect since 1975,
giving the article a great deal of depth and authority. During Apartheid,
the Coloured community suffered not only great limitation of opportunities
to advance, but was also stigmatized as not having a culture. Stone
characterizes their dialect, their mother tongue, as marking a distinct
identity, the dialect being distinct from standard Afrikaans. Within this
dialect, he characterizes the following levels: respectable, disreputable,
delinquent, and outcast.

20. An introduction to Flaaitaal (or Tsotsitaal), by Makhudu Flaaitaal is
a language spoken mostly by Black males in urban settings, with much
structure from Afrikaans, but lexicon from a variety of sources, including
prison jargon. It has a wide variety of names, but is not to be confused
with Fanakalo, which is more for out-group communication. It is a
fascinating introduction to this lect, but the author gives no clear sign
as to whether he believes Flaaitaal is a pidgin, creole, or dialect.

21. Language and language practices in Soweto, by Ntshangase Ntshangase
refers to the lect as Iscamtho, but notes that it is alternatively
referred to as Shalambombo, a term which Makhudu also lists as an
alternate name for Flaaitaal. He distinguishes Iscamtho from Flaaitaal by
saying that Afrikaans is the matrix language for Flaaitaal, but only
embedded in Iscamtho. Different varieties of Iscamtho have Zulu or Sotho
(or some other African languages) as their matrix language. As a move to
distance themselves from Afrikaans and Apartheid, many Flaaitaal speakers
shifted to Iscamtho after the Soweto uprising in 1976.

22. Language planning and language policy: past, present, and future, by
Reagan

23. Language issues in South African education: an overview, by
Murray

24. Recovering multilingualism: recent language-policy developments, by
Heugh These three articles form a subsection ''Language policy, planning
and education'', dealing with difficult areas, with finances, history,
ethnic identity, and pragmatic issues limiting the options. A further
complication in language policy has been the change of government
ministers who oversee these areas, policy emphases changing with the
ministers. (For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Webb's volume,
though these authors cite none of Webb's writings.)

Overall, the book is a valuable compilation on the sociolinguistics of SA.
Some of the articles are stronger, but all are on important and useful
topics for both general sociolinguists and for SA as it seeks to build a
new society. Its biggest gap is a general study of the sociolinguistics of
using Afrikaans today. The book is an obvious strong candidate for
acquisition for sociolinguistic scholars and libraries at institutions
that have courses in this field. Several of the chapters could be assigned
for undergraduate classes.

REFERENCE

Mesthrie, Rajend, ed. 1995 book Language and Social History: Studies
in South African Sociolinguistics. Cape Town: David Phillip.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

The reviewer worked for 12 years in Ethiopia, before and after the
drastic changes in language policy that followed the 1991 revolution.
He is on the faculty of the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics.

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