Non standard varieties

This article investigated the impact of non-standard dialects on Grade 10 learners at the two selected high schools in Winterveldt concerning writing Setswana and how to improve the written competency of Setswana Home Language (HL) learners. The study was conducted at two high schools where 56 participants were selected from Grade 10, with 28 participants from each school. The study employed a qualitative method. In this regard, two focus groups consisting of ten learners each from each school were interviewed. Similarly, class observations, constructive analysis, and text analysis were also used to collect the data. According to the data, it is evident that Non-standard dialects had a significant influence on the written and spoken outputs of the learners and most learners and teachers could not differentiate. The data also suggested that the Setswana written by female learners is better in comparison with how or what the Setswana male learners write. Based on the findings and conclusions the following recommendations can be made: (1)The government and the Department of Education must employ or rather hire native Setswana speakers to teach Setswana home language. (2) When learners do not understand certain aspects of the Setswana classes, teachers must not speak Sepitori to make the learners understand and (3)The use of non-standard dialects must be minimised in schools to reduce its influence on Setswana. The study findings will provide insights to the Department of Education about the challenges that Setswana L1 learners encounter that prevent them from excelling in written competency of the Setswana home language. This will help in policy implementation.

This contribution is an empirical study of morphosyntactic complexity variance in more than four dozen varieties of English, based on four diVerent complexity notions and combining two diVerent data sources.1 Our point of departure is previous research (e.g. Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann forthcoming) according to which varieties of English-be they native L1 vernaculars, non-native L2 varieties, or English-based pidgins and creoles (P/Cs)-can be thought as varying along two underlying dimensions of morphosyntactic variance. Crucially, Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann (forthcoming) demonstrate that variety type (L1, L2, or P/C) and not, for example, geographical distance or proximity, is the best predictor of a given variety's location relative to these two dimensions. The work reported here seeks to complement this line of research in three ways. First, we endeavour to analyse and interpret language-internal variation in English in terms of varying complexity and simplicity levels. More speciWcally, we will be concerned with measuring local morphological and syntactic complexities. The following notions of linguistic complexity will be subject to numerical quantiWcation in the present study: ornamental rule/feature complexity-the number of ''ornamentally complex'' features (cf. McWhorter 2001a) attested in a given variety's morphosyntactic inventory; Sampson et al / Language Complexity 05-Sampson et al-chap5

European Portuguese is the only Romance language displaying an é que-cleft structure, i.e. a strategy in which the focused constituent is fronted followed by é que 'is that'. The analysis of data from the corpus CORDIAL-SIN shows that some non-standard varieties of European Portuguese exhibit a kind of mixed relative clause strategy that combines relativization with é que-clefting, typed here as cleft relative clauses. Assuming a head-raising analysis of relative clauses, we take é que in cleft relatives to be not a lexicalization of Cº but a copula verb that selects a small clause whose subject is empty and whose predicate is a full clause (more precisely, a CP introduced by que). It is from this CP domain that the antecedent of the relative clause is extracted.

This paper explored Sesotho sa seterateng (an informal Sesotho language in Lesotho) to establish the traditional function of Sesotho in the 21st century at schools. The observation made was that, as much as Sesotho sa seterateng is considered informal, learners continue to make use of it even in formal settings such as classrooms. Therefore, this article argued that in terms of language development, this form of language variety adds value to language change. Despite the growing body of literature examining language changes in Sesotho, no research has been conducted on Sesotho sa seterateng. Therefore, this research aimed to analyse the impact of Sesotho sa seterateng when used in formal settings such as schools. The authors interrogated how the use of Sesotho sa seterateng fills the gap between formal and informal Sesotho in the classroom. The article further attempted to address the gap between Sesotho sa seterateng and the formal language used for education purposes. The study wa...

This article aims at investigating how isiZulu speakers residing in Soshanguve report on the use of their ethnic language, isiZulu, and to use the outcomes to confirm how their language continues to be powerfully maintained in Soshanguve. Today in South Africa, there are numerous studies that have investigated the role of English as a dominant language. Other studies have investigated the awareness that there is an extensive shift from using native languages to English. The argument in this article is that in other communities, this shift is counterbalanced by a number of factors. The study adopted a mixed-methods approach, and the data were solicited through questionnaires and semistructured interviews. The sample population in this study comprised 20 participants who were sampled purposively. A purposive sampling technique was used because it suggests that the sampled population should have certain characteristics, and it should be people who will provide information that will ass...

In this paper we will report on recent and ongoing research on large-scale morphosyntactic variation in non-standard varieties of English. Our empirical basis will be what may be called the 'World Atlas of Morphosyntactic Variation in English', which is an outgrowth of the largest comparative study (Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi 2004) to date of entire grammatical subsystems of varieties of English worldwide. A catalogue of 76 morphosyntactic features taken from 11 core areas of English morphosyntax was investigated for 46 (groups of) non-standard varieties of English around the world, including 20 L1 varieties, 11 L2 varieties, and 15 Pidgins and Creoles from all seven anglophone world regions (the British Isles, the Americas, the Caribbean, the Pacific Archipelagos, Australasia, Africa, South and Southeast Asia). We will show that the varieties of English can be thought of as varying along two major morphosyntactic dimensions: analyticity and complexity. We will discuss this variance, along with Greenbergian-type indices of inflectional complexity (Greenberg 1960) derived from naturalistic corpus data, in light of (a) the various complexity notions currently debated in the literature (notably Dahl 2004, McWhorter 2001, Hawkins 2004), and (b) Trudgill's suggestion (forthcoming) that in varieties of English simplification is to be found in high-contact varieties while complexification is characteristic of low-contact varieties, i.e., traditional L1 dialects in the British Isles and North America.

This article established how a mixed language spoken as a lingua franca by black residents of Tshwane, known as Sepitori, influenced learners who studied Setswana as a home language at three high schools in GaRankuwa, Mabopane and Soshanguve; all these three townships are located north of Pretoria’s central business district. Data were gathered from 90 learners (30 from each school) and six Setswana educators from the same schools. Learners wrote an essay in Setswana on an interesting and contemporary topic ‘free education for all university students’, while educators were interviewed individually. Data analysis showed that Sepitori significantly influenced the written output of learners. Some educators were adamant that it was unreasonable to wish away Sepitori in Setswana classrooms because learners and many educators (regardless of the subjects they taught) ordinarily spoke Sepitori at the three townships be it at school or at home.

This article established how a mixed language spoken as a lingua franca by black residents of Tshwane, known as Sepitori, influenced learners who studied Setswana as a home language at three high schools in GaRankuwa, Mabopane and Soshanguve; all these three townships are located north of Pretoria’s central business district. Data were gathered from 90 learners (30 from each school) and six Setswana educators from the same schools. Learners wrote an essay in Setswana on an interesting and contemporary topic ‘free education for all university students’, while educators were interviewed individually. Data analysis showed that Sepitori significantly influenced the written output of learners. Some educators were adamant that it was unreasonable to wish away Sepitori in Setswana classrooms because learners and many educators (regardless of the subjects they taught) ordinarily spoke Sepitori at the three townships be it at school or at home.

This article established how a mixed language spoken as a lingua franca by black residents of Tshwane, known as Sepitori, influenced learners who studied Setswana as a home language at three high schools in GaRankuwa, Mabopane and Soshanguve; all these three townships are located north of Pretoria’s central business district. Data were gathered from 90 learners (30 from each school) and six Setswana educators from the same schools. Learners wrote an essay in Setswana on an interesting and contemporary topic ‘free education for all university students’, while educators were interviewed individually. Data analysis showed that Sepitori significantly influenced the written output of learners. Some educators were adamant that it was unreasonable to wish away Sepitori in Setswana classrooms because learners and many educators (regardless of the subjects they taught) ordinarily spoke Sepitori at the three townships be it at school or at home.

This paper examines the use of a lexical variety used by women prisoners in Swaziland. It analyses whether women prisoners living as a community manipulate language to encode their own terminology in order to remain separate from the dominant society and use expressions that may never be understood by the outside world. The study used the qualitative research design which enabled the researcher to examine the problem from the participants' perspective. It was based at Mawelawela Correctional Institution the only women prison in Swaziland. Data was gathered through the semi-structured face-to-face focus group interview. The interview findings demonstrate that women prisoners coin terminology so that warders, police officers and people from outside the prison will not understand their conversations. They do this mainly to preserve the culture of distancing themselves from the prison authorities, and maintain a distinct linguistic identity. The results of the study suggest that language change has allowed people to manipulate language and even reveal ways in which they use it to encode and have some sort of identity. The interview revealed their attitudes about prison life. They borrow words from other languages to code their language, and also clip words by either cutting the initial part or both the initial and final part of the word. It also discovered that the prisoners use words metaphorically.

This article established how a mixed language spoken as a lingua franca by black residents of Tshwane, known as Sepitori, influenced learners who studied Setswana as a home language at three high schools in GaRankuwa, Mabopane and Soshanguve; all these three townships are located north of Pretoria’s central business district. Data were gathered from 90 learners (30 from each school) and six Setswana educators from the same schools. Learners wrote an essay in Setswana on an interesting and contemporary topic ‘free education for all university students’, while educators were interviewed individually. Data analysis showed that Sepitori significantly influenced the written output of learners. Some educators were adamant that it was unreasonable to wish away Sepitori in Setswana classrooms because learners and many educators (regardless of the subjects they taught) ordinarily spoke Sepitori at the three townships be it at school or at home.

This article established how a mixed language spoken as a lingua franca by black residents of Tshwane, known as Sepitori, influenced learners who studied Setswana as a home language at three high schools in GaRankuwa, Mabopane and Soshanguve; all these three townships are located north of Pretoria’s central business district. Data were gathered from 90 learners (30 from each school) and six Setswana educators from the same schools. Learners wrote an essay in Setswana on an interesting and contemporary topic ‘free education for all university students’, while educators were interviewed individually. Data analysis showed that Sepitori significantly influenced the written output of learners. Some educators were adamant that it was unreasonable to wish away Sepitori in Setswana classrooms because learners and many educators (regardless of the subjects they taught) ordinarily spoke Sepitori at the three townships be it at school or at home.

Sepitori is a mixed language which Black residents of Tshwane speak as a lingua franca. In June 2017, #LearnPitori took South Africa by storm soon after a twitterati posted what s/he deemed to be Sepitori and called out other twitterati to make their submissions. As social media platforms, such as Twitter, accept contributions from all members of the public regardless of how informed or knowledgeable they are about the subject matter at hand, there was a need to establish, from speakers of Sepitori, whether they would equally regard submissions to #LearnPitori as Sepitori. The exponential non-discriminative snowballing sampling method was used to recruit participants, and fourteen of them participated in the study. Data analysis showed evidence of a blurred line between Sepitori and tsotsitaal in the analyzed #LearnPitori statements, as well as from participants. Also, the study found that participants were not aware that Sepitori, as a Matrix Language, has tsotsitaal embedded on it, inasmuch as it would be the case with recognized languages from a 'language purism' perspective.

This paper will outline the theoretical and methodological aspects of comparative research on youth language (with a special focus on the pluricentric Spanish language) in order to arrive at a reliable description of the characteristics and the contextual conditions of the emergence of youth language in different socio-cultural situations as well as their underlying aims, conditions and possible parameters of investigation in accordance with the (pragmatic) identity functions of youth language. Three types of comparison will be established – reflecting the typological, the contrastive and the diatopic-contrastive approach. A particular focus is on diatopic-contrastive research, since comparison of regional varieties of youth language within one language has not played a major role in the debate about youth language so far.