Browsing by Author "Meyer, Grazelde"

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    Linguistic variation in Afrikaans in the Southern Cape: grammatical form and function in the spoken language of young adults
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-03) Meyer, Grazelde; Anthonissen, Christine; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study involves an examination of possibly distinctive features of different variants of Afrikaans. This was done in a town in the southern Cape, in which Afrikaans is the predominant home language and lingua franca. Different varieties of Afrikaans among current residents are widely observed, but have not yet been described in detail. Besides giving a snapshot of current varieties that are in use among speakers between the ages of 18 and 25 years, this study considers a sample of language use in three groups of users in order to assess how recent changing patterns of contact in educational settings may have affected the varieties they speak. The working hypothesis is that the "dialect differences" between formerly socially isolated groups could be in the process of decreasing, as a result of fading social boundaries. This is a small-scale pilot study that tests the hypothesis. The study collected recordings of spoken Afrikaans of young people who fall into three categories, namely (i) those who completed their primary and secondary schooling in the schools within a "coloured residential area" (e.g. Pacaltsdorp primary and high school), (ii) those who completed their primary and secondary schooling in the schools within the "white town areas" (e.g. Outeniqua primary and high school), and (iii) those who started their primary schooling in a school within a coloured residential area, but moved to a historically “white” school (a so-called Model C school) for their high school education. Data was elicited by using pictures of persons that participants were likely to know. The pictures were shown to pairs of speakers as prompts to a discussion that would require comparable words and expressions, thus delivering comparable sets of relatively naturally occurring speech. The recorded data was transcribed in a corpus program (ExMaralda) so that salient forms could be isolated, and the regularity as well as distribution of each form could be easily traced. The data was used to determine if and how the varieties of Afrikaans spoken by members of the three groups differ, and also to check whether there is evidence that the recent language contact between some of the coloured and white participants in their high school years had a noticeable effect on the language forms they are currently using. So the aim was to check whether there is evidence of speech accommodation, dialect levelling and dialect shift, as the different communities gradually integrate more than before. Specific attention went to vocabulary as well as to grammatical features that stood out as markers of one rather than the other community-associated version of Afrikaans.