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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 808

Part of Session 101: Sociophonetic research in emerging varieties (Other abstracts in this session)

South African "coconuts": the emergence of a new black urban middle-class identity and speech variety.

Authors: Wilmot, Kirstin Dianne
Submitted by: Wilmot, Kirstin Dianne (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom)

This paper discusses the findings of a larger sociophonetic study, which investigates language use in the South African context. With changing class structures developing within the South African context since 1994, the influence and hegemony of English is gaining momentum and is being perpetuated by members of the emerging black middle-class.

This paper discusses socio-cultural and subsequent phonetic change taking place in two prestigious school environments in Grahamstown, South Africa. It considers how female isiXhosa mother-tongue speakers, who attend prestigious English schools, are undergoing changes in identity, which are mirrored in the accent of the prestigious variety of English they speak. For this study, ‘prestigious’ is used as a cover term for private and ex-model-C schools, no longer reserved for white people. The study aims to show how these changes are determined, in large part, by social class, and how current descriptions of Black South African English do not account for the variety spoken by these young black elites. The paper focuses on four factors which are seen as contributing to social change: social class; the persisting hegemony of English in the South African context; the construction of multiple identities; and the acquisition of a socially prestigious accent.

The research reported in this paper takes a pragmatist position in the methodology of the research, with the adoption of a “mixed methods” (Dörnyei 2007) approach. This allows for both qualitative (analysis of attitudes) and quantitative (sociophonetic analysis of accent, with a focus on the TRAP, DRESS and GOOSE vowels, using the acoustic programme Praat) data to be analysed collaboratively, highlighting the interconnectedness and interdependent relationship between them. The data used in the study were collected at two prestigious girls’ secondary schools in Grahamstown. Data includes 24 sociolinguistic interviews with 12 white English mother-tongue speakers, and 12 black isiXhosa mother-tongue speakers, aged between 16-18 years.

The findings suggest that changes in identity construction are evident in young female isiXhosa speakers. Changes in social class have increased opportunities to attend prestigious English schools, where speech accommodation and cultural assimilation is evident. The result of this is the acquisition of a prestigious English variety. Middle-class isiXhosa mother-tongue speakers are now proficient in both English and isiXhosa. They value both these languages, and both languages are used dynamically, interchangeably and strategically, to construct and maintain multiple identity positions used to access a variety of domains. Phonetic analysis shows that the prestigious variety of English used by these speakers cannot be accounted for in either descriptions of White South African English or Black South African English. This suggests that the variety spoken by these elites should be described in terms of social class, as opposed to existing descriptions based on race.

References

Dörnyei, Z. 2007. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.