South African English as a late 19th-century extraterritorial variety

作者：Bekker Ian^*

来源：English World-Wide: A Journal of Varieties of English , 2012, 33(2): 127-146.

DOI：10.1075/eww.33.2.01bek

• South African English
• koineization
• dialect contact
• extraterritorial Englishes
• new-dialect formation
• 19th-century English
• BATH vowel
• START-Backing
• Johannesburg

This article argues that the external history of South African English (SAfE) points towards the merits of conceptualizing SAfE as the product of a three-stage koineization process, the last stage of which takes place contemporaneously with the establishment of Johannesburg. This is at odds with the standard position, which views SAfE as an early-to-mid 19th-century variety with its characteristic features having been fixed during the earlier colonization of the Cape and Natal. This reconceptualization is, in turn, usefully employed to solve Trudgill's (2004) so-called "South African puzzle'': in essence, the postulation of SAfE as a late 19th-century English explains why START-Backing has occurred in SAfE but not in the closely related Australasian varieties.

• 出版日期2012
• 单位西北大学