Browsing by Author "Paterson, Moya Colleen"

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    The linguistic markers of the language variety spoken by gang members on the Cape Flats, according to the film Dollars and White Pipes
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2003-03) Paterson, Moya Colleen; Southwood, Frenette; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The non-standard “way of speaking” associated with gang members on the Cape Flats is the focus of the present study. This thesis is not about gangsters and gang culture, neither is it an attempt to analyze their use of language. Rather, it is an investigation of the linguistic markers of the language variety spoken by gang members on the Cape Flats, according to the film Dollars and White Pipes. This film portrays the true story of Bernie Baatjies and is set in Hanover Park, an area on the Cape Flats characterized by a high level of unemployment and low levels of education. During the Apartheid years, people of colour all over Cape Town were displaced: they were forced to move to barren land and start rebuilding their lives all over again. The youth perceived their parents as cowards for not fighting back against the system. Their anger with their parents led to the formation of gangs on the Cape Flats. These gangs resort to violence, using it as a means of dominating others and showing power through claiming territory. Gang members establish in-group distinctiveness through speech divergence. In this thesis, the notion of establishing membership of a specific linguistic community, in this case gang membership, by means of vocabulary use is examined with reference to concepts such as slang, anti-language and social judgments based on linguistic aspects. It is shown that the linguistic repertoire of the Cape Flats gangsters as a speech community can broadly be categorised as non-standard Afrikaans, non-standard English and English-Afrikaans code switching. In order to examine the linguistic markers of the language variety spoken by gang members on the Cape Flats, utterances in the film that were judged non-standard were transcribed orthographically. The standard version of each utterance was also identified. Non-standard words and phrases were then grouped according to language and parts of speech. These non-standard words and phrases were in turn presented to real–life gangsters from the Cape Flats in order to obtain judgements on their authenticity. Research approaches and methods drawn on in the thesis are Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Discourse Analysis (DA), both of which are briefly discussed.