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South Africa - Black South African English

The largest part of the black population in South Africa speaks one of the Bantu languages as their mother tongue. Nevertheless, many Blacks have come to use English as an L2. English is an important medium of education in South Africa, especially for higher education. In urban areas, where there is closer contact with the language via other ethnic groups and via the media, English is also increasingly used in other contexts. Growing numbers of Black South African English speakers even use English as an L1. Still, in rural areas there are substantial numbers of Blacks who have not come into contact with English at all. Therefore, Black South African English (BSAE) can be seen as a variety in transition, with great heterogeneity among its speech community.

As BSAE is an indigenised variety, based on a non-native variety, it displays specific features that differ from the features of native standard varieties. Those features originate to some extent in the variety’s original status of a learner language. In the process of second language acquisition, transfer of certain features or their specific realisation from the speaker’s mother tongues takes place. Those features can then stabilise in a variety, even if it is no longer a learner language.

Table Mountain (Cape Town, South Africa) © Heiko Schittek 2006

BSAE is distinguished from the British standard mainly by its phonology and discourse structures. Among the most salient features of BSAE are the syllable-timed rhythm of speech, the pronunciation of this and think as ‘dis’ and ‘tink’, and a loss of vowel contrasts (since the Bantu languages have less vowels than standard English).

Reviews of available literature on books dealing with this English variety can be found here