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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This study set out to examine the sociolinguistics of social change amongst a group of young, middle-class coloured people who were educated in a predominantly white school environment. The demise of the apartheid system in the early 1990s led to a situation in which racial mixing in government-run schools was permitted for the first time. I conducted sociolinguistic interviews with 20 self-identified 'coloured' Cape Town residents, who attended schools that were formerly open only to white children. I analysed the data on two levels. Firstly, an analysis of accent, focusing on three salient phonetic markers of South African English, namely the GOOSE, BATH and PRICE lexical sets (Wells 1982). Acoustic analysis of these vowels was done using a computer software programme, Praat, to record a total of 4410 tokens for the 20 speakers. The second level of analysis investigated how the informants constructed social identities in those unprecedented educational circumstances. I used three theories of identity to do this: Speech Accommodation Theory (Giles 1973), Social Identity Theory (Taj fel 1972) and the Linguistic Market (Bourdieu and Boltanski 1975). Comparing the results of the phonetic and sociological analyses, I found that the two levels of analysis supported the same conclusion: the young coloured people in the sample subscribe to a coloured social identity, but have clear links with the white community. This suggests that they occupy an intermediate space between the two race groups, which is not surprising given the significant contact they had with members of both communities. There is some evidence of a separation between the coloured community and the typical 'coloured' accent, however, suggesting that one does not need to sound 'typically coloured' in order to be part of the coloured community. It is likely that we are witnessing the formation of an upper middle-class within the coloured middle-class community.

This study draws on the conceptual framework of language maintenance and shift to examine the phenomenon of West African migration to post-apartheid South Africa. The study aims to determine how immigrants negotiate language and cultural differences, how attempts to integrate into their new society shape or reshape their identities, the consequences of this attempt at integration on their home languages and ultimately, their placement in their new society. It follows a qualitative research methodological approach for data collection where participants' language use and language choices are observed. Unstructured interviews and participant observation were utilised as tools for data collection. The data was analysed using thematic analysis to identify the themes and patterns that emerged from the qualitative data collected. Following an interpretive paradigm, the study was done to record how space, mobility, and anti-immigrant sentiments impact the language choices of immigrants in Cape Town, South Africa. All South African cities are highly multilingual and multicultural including Cape Town. Although South Africa has eleven official languages (now 12 with the recent addition of sign language), many other languages have made their way into the country because of the flow of immigrants from already highly multilingual and multicultural African countries. Migration studies have shown that Africans migrate with complex, fluid and multi-layered linguistic repertoires which develop into an even more complex one in their new society because of their multilingual backgrounds. Although researchers (Vigouroux, 2008; Wankah, 2009; Mbong, 2008; Orman, 2012; Nchang, 2018) have done some work on West African migration to South Africa, these studies have not extensively documented the impact of Nigerian migrants' language practices or choices on the vitality of their heritage languages in Cape Town. The present study, therefore, focuses on some Nigerian immigrants in Cape Town by examining the effect of space and identity negotiation in the diaspora on their home languages. It raises the question: what is the fate of immigrant heritage languages such as Yoruba and Nigerian Pidgin English in the diaspora in terms of language maintenance and shift? To the researcher's current knowledge, there is no study on language maintenance and shift with regard to Nigerian Pidgin and Yoruba in Cape Town. Therefore, there is no evidence suggesting the maintenance or shift of these languages. Based on this, the current research set out to investigate the vitality of said languages in Cape Town. In addition, it is important to monitor and document immigrants' languages in the diaspora. Research such as this potentially builds on existing works and expands scholarly knowledge in the field of language maintenance and shift as it relates to migrants' heritage languages. This dissertation explores the vitality of Nigerian immigrants' languages, Nigerian Pidgin and Yoruba, within the context of Cape Town. This is done through an exploration of the linguistic practices of selected Nigerian immigrants residing in some areas of Cape Town, South Africa, focusing on the impact of their language use patterns on the maintenance of their home languages or shift from them. The focus on Yoruba and Pidgin reflects the two main languages of Nigeria today; these are languages that I can monitor in migration. Furthermore, while Yoruba has “ethnic” overtones, Pidgin is more widely construed as “Nigerian”, hence it is necessary to study both together. The analysis of data indicates that immigrants' social positioning as both outsiders and insiders in their new society presents certain challenges to the vitality of their heritage languages. On the one hand, they grapple with the desire to maintain their identities as Nigerians but on the other, they risk exclusion and discrimination which can sometimes be life-threatening should they maintain their cultural affiliations and heritage languages. This places them in a difficult position. This study illuminates some of the challenges immigrants face as they negotiate their place in their new societies.

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The purpose of this dissertation is to bring under investigation two of the three relative clause strategies in Swahili within the framework of the Revised Extended Standard Theory (c.f. Chomsky (1977, 1980), and Chomsky and Lasnik (1977)). Various surface differences between the tensed and amba relative clause strategies are revealed and analyzed. Much of the data on which the analyses are based has not appeared in the literature prior to this work. For the most part, an attempt is made here to analyze Swahili relatives within a framework where constraints are stated as well-formedness conditions on the representations produced by the components of the grammar, rather than as constraints on particular rules. It is argued that the surface differences between the tensed and amba relatives may be attributed to two facts. First, amba is a verb and hence an amba relative will contain one more embedding than its tensed paraphrase. Secondly, evidence is presented which supports a movement analysis of relativization in the tensed relative. Thus, the relative binds a trace within the clause in this strategy. A variety of constructions are introduced where the relative pronoun is anaphorically related to a full pronoun within the modifying clause. The anaphora exhibited in such cases and in the amba relative is accounted for by the normal anaphoric processes that apply in relatives and non-relatives alike. A metacondition on the interpretation of relative clauses is proposed--the Relative Clause Interpretation Condition. Given the appropriate syntactic configuration, a representation is interpreted as a relative clause if the head of the clause is not disjoint with an NP within the clause. An innovative aspect of this study is the treatment given Subject Postposing and directly related topics. There are two rules which postpose subjects. One rule applies in relatives and another applies in a construction labelled Focus. The analysis of Focus involves a variety of theoretical issues and language particular insights into Swahili syntax: Focus is analyzed as a subcase of Passive; Agreement Conditions applying in Logical Form will function as constraints on morphological representations, and; Subject Postposing in Focus sentences produces structures subject to the structure preservation constraint, a constraint on the representations produced by the rules in the syntax. On the other hand, the structures produced by postposing in the relatives is not subject to this constraint. It is argued that the rule which postposes subjects in relatives is not an instance of move (alpha), but applies in the Stylistic Component.