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South Africa - Coloured English

Afrikaans still is the mother tongue of round 80% of the coloured population, while round 20% of the Coloureds are English mother tongue speakers now. Since the beginning of the British settlement, there has always been rather close contact of Coloured Afrikaans speakers with mother tongue speakers of English, especially in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. This has resulted in extensive Afrikaans/English bilingualism among coloured speakers.

However, because of the internal stability of the coloured community there are still salient “Afrikaans” features palpable in CE, even if the number of L1 speakers of CE is steadily increasing. These distinct CE features comprehend a sentence intonation that resembles the Afrikaans one, Afrikaans loanwords and expressions, such as “I’m busy reading”, and some changes in vowel quality, resulting, for example, in a pronunciation of star that rather resembles store.

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

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