Ethnicity and Language Variation

Grammar and Code-switching in the Afrikaans Speech Community

Gerald Stell author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Peter Lang AG

Published:2nd Dec '11

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Ethnicity and Language Variation cover

This book discusses the linguistic reflection of ethnicity using as an illustration informal speech patterns in the bi-ethnic Afrikaans speech community. Its theoretical outlook is based on variationist studies and discourse studies on the processes shaping ethnicity. Two areas of language variation come into focus, namely Afrikaans morphosyntax and Afrikaans-English code-switching. Coloured and White speech norms are quantitatively reconstructed on the basis of a corpus of informal speech. This forms the point of departure for a qualitative reconstruction of strategies of ethnic identity negotiation. It is shown that quantifiable trends of linguistic convergence are not incompatible with enduring ethnic differentiation in speech norms.

ISBN: 9783631621653

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 480g

298 pages

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