Postcolonial nation-building and language variation: Linguistic fault lines and convergence in Namibia
-
Date
14 Sep 2020
-
Organiser
Department of English
-
Time
17:00 - 18:00
-
Venue
Live webinar
Remarks
The talk will be conducted in English.
Summary
About the Speaker
Gerald Stell is currently Assistant professor in the Department of English at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests include language contact, New Englishes, and African sociolinguistics. His current research project concerns variation dynamics in multilingual repertoires in the context of Namibia. He has published in English World-Wide, Lingua, Pragmatics, Language and Social Psychology.
Abstract
This presentation sheds light on the socio-economic factors that determine the relocation of sociolinguistic prestige away from former colonial centres in postcolonial environments. It uses the case of Namibia, an ethnolinguistically diverse African country that replaced Afrikaans – an established lingua franca – with English as its official language to weaken the hold of the formerly ruling White Afrikaans-speaking minority on its linguistic marketplace while symbolically empowering the Black majority. Using Afrikaans and English phonetic features elicited from an ethnolinguistically representative sample, the study finds that Whites still align with South African norms. Meanwhile, the Blacks are moving away from these - more distinctly in English than in Afrikaans - and mutually converging around local ‘compromise’ features that are often not directly traceable to indigenous languages. The findings have implications for understanding the emergence of new L2-varieties in multi-ethnic postcolonial settings. More specifically, they offer a fresh perspective on ‘New Englishes’ as balancing acts between ethnically neutral and authentically local identities.
Gerald Stell is currently Assistant professor in the Department of English at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests include language contact, New Englishes, and African sociolinguistics. His current research project concerns variation dynamics in multilingual repertoires in the context of Namibia. He has published in English World-Wide, Lingua, Pragmatics, Language and Social Psychology.
Abstract
This presentation sheds light on the socio-economic factors that determine the relocation of sociolinguistic prestige away from former colonial centres in postcolonial environments. It uses the case of Namibia, an ethnolinguistically diverse African country that replaced Afrikaans – an established lingua franca – with English as its official language to weaken the hold of the formerly ruling White Afrikaans-speaking minority on its linguistic marketplace while symbolically empowering the Black majority. Using Afrikaans and English phonetic features elicited from an ethnolinguistically representative sample, the study finds that Whites still align with South African norms. Meanwhile, the Blacks are moving away from these - more distinctly in English than in Afrikaans - and mutually converging around local ‘compromise’ features that are often not directly traceable to indigenous languages. The findings have implications for understanding the emergence of new L2-varieties in multi-ethnic postcolonial settings. More specifically, they offer a fresh perspective on ‘New Englishes’ as balancing acts between ethnically neutral and authentically local identities.
