The Anglophone Settlement of South Africa

The standard model of the historical formation of South African English posits that anglophone SAfE is an early-to-mid nineteenth-century overseas variety of English. In this chapter an alternative, three-stage koinéisation model is advanced which places emphasis on the role played by a koinéisation process in the greater-Johannesburg area spanning the first half of the twentieth century. As such, the first half of the current chapter will be focused on outlining the history of the development of this variety, with a particular focus on the Johannesburg period. The second half is focused on providing evidence from sociolinguistic interviews with twenty-six (26) L1-Broad WSAE speakers born in the first half of the twentieth century, one-half of whom are first-generation speakers from Johannesburg, one-half of whom are (non-first-generation) speakers born in the Eastern Cape. More specifically, the degree of inter- and intra-speaker variability in relation to two sociolinguistic variables (the quality of BATH and (-in/-ing)) is investigated. The results indicate that while there is no clear difference between the two regions in terms of BATH, the presence of substantial -ing/-in variation in the speech of Johannesburg-born speakers points to koinéisation in this area, thus providing support for the three-stage model.