Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about…

A number of post-colonial countries in Africa have introduced home language instruction for the initial years of schooling. This policy is particularly challenging in mathematics, as there is a paucity of research on how the linguistic features of African languages might be leveraged for the teaching and learning of mathematics. This paper…

This article offers a historiographic analysis of twentieth century debates amongst agents with linguistic, missionary and ideological interest in the standardisation or harmonisation of two widely used clusters of languages in South Africa, Nguni and Sotho. The discussion illustrates how faith-based and political ideologies interact with and…

This dissertation first addresses various shortcomings in definitions of "applicative" when compared to what is actually found across languages. It then proposes a four-way distinction among applicative constructions, relevant at least to Bantu, a large family of languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa. Because of the gradual nature of…

This paper explores the impact of a narrative multilingualism approach on in-service primary school teachers who attended the Advanced Certificate of Education (ACE) Languages course at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2009. The teachers wrote their own language narratives and were required to implement language narrative work in their…

While the concept of standardization is well-established in linguistics, destandardization is a more recent addition to linguistic terminology. Drawing on historiographic and ethnographic data from isiXhosa, one of South Africa's indigenous languages, this paper reflects on both of these concepts. Standardization is discussed as a modernist grand…

Earlier research argues that "busy" in South African English was, contrary to prevailing scholarly intuitions, not attributable to Afrikaans influence, except for a lifting of the semantic restriction that the verb being modified refer to work activities. Tests these conclusions in light of further data and the rise of corpus…

In historical linguistics, there are features that can have endogenous or contact origins. One argument is that if the informal probability weightings of both source types converge for a given character, then the choice goes to endogeny. Intensive language contact may produce characteristics that cannot be accounted for in terms of binary…

Examines South African Indian English (SAIE), a subvariety of South African English influenced by Indian English, other languages of India, and life in southern Africa, with particular focus on the history, phonetics, syntax, and vocabulary of SAIE. (Contains two references.) (MDM)

Examines the language planning situation in South Africa, where language has been instrumental in the country's transition from colonialism to apartheid to democracy. Addresses, diachronically and synchronically, the issues of language spread and use, language policy and planning, and language maintenance and shift. (Author/VWL)

Examines the role of language policy in South African education. An historical overview of language planning is presented, and then several examples of current language policies are discussed, including the "Mother Tongue Principle," the introduction of Black languages into White schools, and the creation of a lexicon for the deaf. (CFM)

Examines the constraints on the realization of "/t/" in New Zealander English. On the basis of an examination of the speech of two similar speakers from that country, a series of allophonic rules is provided. The article shows that the distribution of allophones for these speakers is not the same as for other speakers who have been…

This report provides data on standard and non-standard African language varieties occurring in urban areas of South Africa, drawn from nine smaller reports. It illustrates the language use patterns in black urban communities and describes the language varieties spoken in them. It was found that the impact of non-standard varieties on the use of…

A study investigated how and why code switching and mixing occurs between English and Afrikaans in a region of South Africa. In District Six, non-standard Afrikaans seems to be a mixed code, and it is unclear whether non-standard English is a mixed code. Consequently, it is unclear when codes are being switched or mixed. The analysis looks at…

Reviews recent research in multilingualism in Southern Africa, focusing on the role of languages in education, sociolinguistics, and language policy. Much of the research is on South Africa. Topics discussed include language of instruction in schools, teacher education, higher education, adult literacy, language contact, gender and linguistic…