Seminar l Postcolonial nation-building and language variation: Linguistic fault lines and convergence in Namibia

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.