NKONKO M. KAMWANGAMALU
This chapter discusses the form and functions of Southern African Englishes, that is, the varieties of English that have developed in Southern Africa as a result of contact between English and African languages. First, the chapter describes some of the phonological, lexical and syntactic features distinguishing Southern African Englishes from other varieties of English around the world. Next, it discusses the functions of English in the region, with a focus on the use of this language in the media, education, and creative literature. Finally, it considers Southern Africans’ attitudes toward English and the status and impact of this language on language‐in‐education practices in the region. It notes the status of English in Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony surrounded by six former British colonies including Tanzania to the north, Malawi and Zambia to the northwest, Zimbabwe to the west, and Swaziland and South Africa to the southwest. Due to its geographical location, English has a role in Mozambique in ways that no other Expanding Circle countries in the region can match.
English‐speaking Southern Africa includes Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. All these nations except South Africa (and, to a lesser extent, Zimbabwe) belong in the Outer Circle (Kachru 1996a), which includes countries where English is an institutionalized variety and is used as an official language. As Kamwangamalu (2007: 264) notes, “in South Africa English belongs in two of the three concentric circles described in Kachru (1992), the Inner Circle and the Outer Circle; that is, English is used as a first language by some and as a second language by others.” English belongs in the Inner Circle since it is spoken as a first or home language by over 1.7 million South African whites of British descent and by the younger generations of Indian South Africans. It belongs in the Outer Circle because it is spoken as a second or foreign language by a minority of South Africa’s black population, the older generations of Indian South Africans, and the whites of Dutch descent, the Afrikaners. All of the aforementioned Southern African nations were British colonies except Namibia, a former German and subsequently apartheid South African colony that secured independence from South Africa in 1990.
These Southern African nations have chosen English either as the sole official language (e.g. Botswana, Malawi, Namibia, and Zambia), apparently to avoid ethno‐linguistic fragmentation and strife, or as a co‐official language with African languages (e.g. Lesotho, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe) to promote, in theory, the social status of the indigenous languages. Kamwangamalu (2001: 48) asserts that the history of English in the region begins with the seizure of the Cape in 1806 by Britain from the Dutch, who had settled in and ruled the territory since 1652. The language was firmly established in the countries alongside South Africa, when they became British colonies in the nineteenth century in what came to be known as the “Scramble for Africa,” that is, the colonial division of Africa among western powers including Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. The following section discusses the forms of Southern African Englishes; the subsequent section considers the functions of English in the region.
Of all the varieties of English spoken in Southern Africa, there is perhaps none that has been so much the focus of scientific research as Black South African English (de Klerk 1996, 2002; Kamwangamalu 2002; Kasanga 2006; Louw & de Wet 2007; Makalela 2013; Spencer 2011; Tereblanche 2009; van Rooy 2007). Studies have found that Black South African English, especially its spoken form, has been influenced by the morphosyntactic and discourse structures of the Bantu languages with which English has come into contact, among them Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swati, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu. This conclusion about the influence of Bantu languages on Black South African English (BSAE) can be extended to other Englishes spoken in the region. The Bantu languages influencing BSAE not only belong to the same family, but they are also spoken in other Southern African countries as well: Zulu in Malawi; Ndebele, Tsonga, Tswana, and Venda in Zimbabwe and Tswana and Ndebele in Botswana. This section describes phonological, lexical, and syntactic features of Southern African Englishes. Speakers of English in the region have shaped the language to meet their communication needs. All the features are evidence of the importation of Bantu languages and cultures into English.
Some of the most salient phonological features of Englishes in Southern Africa include the lack of contrast between long and short vowels, consonant substitution, syllable‐ rather than stress‐timing, and idiosyncratic word stress.
Most Bantu languages operate with a five‐vowel system, while English uses, depending on the variety, a wider range of vowels and diphthongs (Ladefoged 2001a, 2001b). Ladefoged (2001b) notes that American English, for instance, operates with a 10‐vowel system including five short and five long vowels and five diphthongs. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) English, however, is said to have 11 vowels (six long and five short vowels) and nine diphthongs. Speakers of Southern African Englishes tend not to observe the distinctions found between various vowels in Received Pronunciation and related varieties. There is no difference in pronunciation, for instance, between bed, bird, and bad; between chick and cheek; between head and haired; or between pull and pool. Similarly, in a study of the phonological features of English in Botswana, Letsholo (1996) found that speakers tend to merge lax and tense vowels, high and mid vowels. Accordingly, the words in each of the following pairs are treated as homophonous: mad and maid, pad and paid, man and men, bit and beat. What Letsholo reports about English in Botswana is true for other varieties of English spoken elsewhere in Southern Africa (see Schmied 1996 for English in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe; de Klerk 2002, Makalela 2013, and Bekker 2014 for Black South African English). The features described here are not unique to the varieties of English spoken in Southern Africa. Todd (1986) has documented similar features in West African English. In particular, Todd (1986: 288) notes that with its smaller inventory of vowels, West African English naturally has more homophones, especially in the speech of less highly educated members of the community who make no phonological distinctions, for instance, between bed and bird and duck and dock.
Word stress in Southern African Englishes varies considerably. In other words, there seems to be no general stress pattern according to which the Englishes of Southern Africa can be described. Sometimes the stress is placed on the penultimate syllable, as in hospita'lity; other times, however, it is placed either on the second syllable, as in com'fortable, main'tenance; on the first syllable, as in 'committee; or on the last syllable, as in orga'nism, circums'tance, and commi'ttee.
Because they do not exist in Bantu languages, the fricatives [θ] and [ð ] are either avoided or are replaced by alveolar [t] or [f] and dental [d], respectively. Thus, there is a tendency, especially on the part of less highly educated speakers, to pronounce words such as things, those and teeth as tings, dose, and teef, respectively. Similarly, teeth and thief are homophonous, since the [θ] in these words is not used phonemically. In such a case, then, only the context will determine which one of the two words is being used. For additional phonological features, see de Klerk (2002) and Kasanga (2006).
Many Southern African Englishes have borrowed a wide range of vocabulary from indigenous languages. These borrowed items have become an integral part of the speech patterns of most users of English in this part of the world, with the possible exception of South African whites of British descent. The semantic areas likely to attract borrowings include foods (the maize dish, for instance, called sadza in Zimbabwe, sima/nshima in Zambia and Malawi, pap in Swaziland, mealie‐mealie in South Africa); local garments (zambia is the name for a women’s garment in Zimbabwe, but in Zambia and Malawi it is called citenge; Schmied 1996); traditional ceremonies designed to celebrate the first fruit/the harvest (e.g. iciila in Zambia, incwala in Swaziland, umkhosi wokweshwama in South Africa); and sociopolitical structure (e.g. lobola ‘bride price’, a pan‐Southern African term; impi ‘king's warriors’, inyanga ‘traditional healer’, co‐wife ‘one of the two or more wives who share a man’, right‐hand wife ‘an intimate wife, one in whom the husband has more faith and confidence’, principal wife ‘the first‐married wife’). Some vocabulary items may have a regional basis. In a study of South African Black English, for instance, Gough (1996: 64) found that the word skebenga ‘criminal’ is used mostly in Xhosa‐speaking areas, while madumbies ‘a type of edible root’ and skerebesh ‘loose woman’ are commonly used in Natal and the Witwatersrand, respectively.
Hybridization is a process whereby words from an African language combine with English bound morphemes, such as ‐ism, ‐ed/‐ise, or un‐, to create words that are phonetically neither entirely Bantu nor English (Kamwangamalu & Chisanga 1996). Examples are khonta ‘seek a piece of land from the chief’ and ngena ‘marry a widow, without her consent, to her late husband’s brother’:
Additional examples include mulunguism ‘whiteman‐like behavior’, Swaziism ‘Swazi‐like behavior’, Bandaism ‘ideas inspired by Kamuzu Banda, the late life‐president of Malawi’, mbayiyanism ‘lynching’, mbayiyanize ‘lynch’ (Swaziland), unSwazi ‘not Swazi’.
It is common in Outer Circle Englishes in Southern Africa for noncount nouns to be used as count nouns, as luggage – luggages, a luggage; fish – fishes; advice – advices; hair – hairs; food – foods. Conversely, English pluralia tantum such as trousers and scissors are sometimes used in the singular:
In most of the Outer Circle Southern African Englishes, there is a tendency to invert the auxiliary verb and subject in reported speech, as documented by Arua (1998) for Swazi(land) English; Schmied (1991) for Malawian, Zambian, and Zimbabwean English; and Gough (1996) and Makalela (2013) for BSAE, as illustrated in (8) – (10):
Subject‐verb inversion seems to be a strategy that speakers use to keep the original question in focus or, as Arua (1998: 143) puts it, to make the original question easily recoverable. Makelela (2013) explains that subject‐verb inversion, or what he calls “retention of question word order,” is due to the influence of Bantu languages, in which this is a common feature. Further evidence of the influence of African languages on the syntactic structure of Southern African Englishes is presented in Chisanga and Kamwangamalu (1997) and Bokamba (1996).
Kamwangamalu (1996) reports that in Swazi English, for instance, speakers may omit the particle of a phrasal verb, as in (9a); add a particle, as in (10a); or turn ordinary verbs into phrasal verbs, as in (11). Phrasal verbs such as crop up, apply to, look for, and look after are commonly used without their respective particles, while ordinary verbs such as discuss are used with a particle, as in discuss about. The structures in (11a)‐(13a) were collected from students’ essays. They seem to be more common than their (b) counterparts, and do occur in other Southern African Englishes, as de Klerk (2002: 363) confirms with the structures in (14) and (15) from Black South African English.
Speakers of English in Southern Africa tend to use indirect speech rather than the “Anglo‐Saxon” norm of directness or “getting to the point.” This is particularly true in interactions involving people of different age groups (e.g. young person with an adult) or of different social statuses (e.g. employee with employer, pupil with teacher). The following sentence was produced by a Malawian pupil talking to his teacher, Mr. Phiri: I thought I would ask Mr Phiri to read the draft of my composition before I submit it. The pupil avoids using the personal pronoun you, because in Malawian languages, as in most Bantu languages, such a direct address form would be viewed as disrespectful (Magura 1984). The politeness norms in Bantu languages require that in such an interaction as this, the pupil use either a plural pronoun (which you is not, from the perspective of Bantu languages) or refer indirectly to the person being addressed, hence the use of Mr. Phiri instead of you.
Makalela (2004) provides the examples in (16) and (17) from Tswana English in South Africa. Similar examples must obtain in the varieties of English spoken in Botswana, as well as in the varieties of English spoken by speakers of such related languages as seSotho and sePedi, which, together with Tswana, constitute the Sotho language group.
Makalela (2004: 360) explains that Sotho languages do not mark any lower‐clause verbs for past tense in narrative sentences. Instead, it seems that only the verb in the first clause is marked for tense, as is evident from the structures in (16) and (17).
Magura (1984) and Arua (1998) identified “body symbolism” as one of the characteristic features of Southern African Englishes. They observed that speakers of Bantu languages tend to refer to the various parts of the body to convey personal feelings. This practice is carried over into the Outer Circle varieties of English spoken in Southern Africa, as shown in examples (18) through (22):
On the surface, all these examples look like English, but, underlyingly, they reflect Bantu cultural imports into the language. Consider, for instance, the conversation in (18) between a mother, Mandisa, and her daughter. Magura observes that in this conversation Mandisa uses the term head instead of headache. He explains that this is because in Bantu culture, one suffers not from headache but from the head. Also, one may suffer either from the “entire head,” or from “part of it.” This explains why Mandisa’s daughter says it (the head) is in the right eye now. It is this particular part of the head, the right eye, that the daughter is complaining about. What is particularly African here, as Magura (1984:154) explains further, is the implied correlation between what is kicking in the right eye and the coming of Mandisa’s grandson. This association is culture bound and can be interpreted only within the sociocultural context of the text. It seems, as Makalela (2013: 104) observes with regard to Black South African English, that “the substrate rules of African languages influence the production of the features” of Southern African Englishes.
Code‐switching, the alternating use of two or more languages within the same speech situation, is one of the most common characteristic features of Southern African Englishes. Code‐switching is so widespread in Southern Africa that it has become an integral part of the linguistic repertoires of those who have command of English and one or more indigenous languages. It can be heard in TV or radio programs, in the street, in government offices, in academic lectures, and in parliament; in short, it can be heard in everyday interaction involving people who share the same linguistic repertoire (Kamwangamalu 1994, 1996, 2000). Examples (23) and (24) illustrate code‐switching in the Southern African context. Example (23) involves Zulu‐English code‐switching and was recorded on a university campus. Example (24) involves ciChewa‐English code‐switching and was collected from a newspaper in Malawi. In both cases, the participants could have expressed themselves either in English or Zulu (23) or ciChewa (24), since they obviously speak these languages. However, in Southern Africa, English is a marker of education and modernization. Therefore, using Zulu or ciChewa alone would have stripped the utterance of the identity the speaker wished to project – that of an educated person. Using English alone, on the other hand, would have taken away the emotion that Zulu and ciChewa convey, especially in what in each example seems to be a tense or unpleasant situation.
‘The administration knows that student power lies in mass action’.
‘Have you imagined the embarrassment and the discomfort to the cellmates?’
To summarize, Southern African Englishes are marked by the grammatical features of the African languages with which English has been in contact for the past 400 or so years. If the features of Southern African Englishes surveyed in this chapter are any indication, it seems that African languages are likely to continue affecting the structures of Southern African Englishes, much as English would impact the structures of the indigenous languages. There is substantial research investigating the impact of African languages on English in Southern Africa (Arua 1998; Magura 1984; Kasanga 2006), but further research is needed to shed light on the effect of English on the indigenous languages in the region.
Kamwangamalu (2006) used Kachru’s (1996b: 58) framework to report on the functions of English in South Africa, among them instrumental, interpersonal, regulative, and creative/imaginative. Here I use the same framework to discuss the functions of English in the Southern African region as a whole. The interpersonal function refers to the use of English both as a symbol of eliteness and modernity and as a link language between speakers of various languages in a multilingual society. The instrumental function refers to the use of English in a country’s educational system and in other such higher domains as the government and administration, the media, the formal economy, etc. The regulative function concerns the use of English for the regulation of conduct in such domains as the legal system and administration. The imaginative/innovative function refers to the use of English in literary genres. The interpersonal function of English has been widely documented (de Klerk 2002; Makalela 2004; Kasanga 2006). In this section, I consider the other functions, with a focus on the use of English in the media, education, and creative literature.
In schools in Southern Africa, English is the medium of instruction from the third grade onward (except in predominantly white schools in South Africa, where it is a medium from the first grade) through the remainder of the educational system, including at colleges and universities. Even in such multilingual countries as South Africa, where English is but one of that country’s 11 official languages, it is the chief medium of instruction in the entire educational system. It competes with Afrikaans at what were previously Afrikaans‐medium universities. These universities have now become bilingual to accommodate black students’ demand for English‐medium education.
Besides being the dominant language in education, English is also the language most widely used in the spoken and print media in all former British colonies in the region. In print media, for instance, in each of these colonies there are more newspapers in English than in any indigenous language. Moreover, English is prominent in radio and television broadcasts. In a survey of the distribution of weekly airtime on South African television, for instance, Kamwangamalu (1998) found that English enjoyed 91.95% of the total air time; Afrikaans had 5.66%; while the nine indigenous official languages shared only 2.29%. A more recent study by Makalela (2013: 94) also shows that, in South Africa, “English has gained more clout than any other language in commercial, media, government, and educational domains despite the constitutional commitments to the 11 official languages.”
The hegemony of English in Southern Africa is also evident in creative literature. English‐speaking African writers in general, and Southern African writers in particular, have published more books in English than in any indigenous language. The indigenous languages enjoy majority use only in live, oral communication. Chapman (1996: xvii) notes that of the countries of Southern Africa, the largest and most contentious is South Africa, which, in terms of its literary interests, publication outlets, and relatively large readership, has virtually subsumed any literary identity there might once have been in the neighboring states of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland. The next‐highest ranked in terms of viable literary culture is Zimbabwe, followed by Malawi and Zambia.
Despite its widespread use in literary works in Southern Africa, English has been accused, as Schmied (1991: 121) notes, of being elitist, of being European and cutting Africans off from their own traditions. These accusations have created a division amongst African writers. On the one hand, there are those, particularly in East Africa (e.g. Ngu͂gĩ wa Thiong’o and Penina M. Mlama) who argue that continued use of English hinders the promotion of indigenous languages and that the latter should be used for literary expression. Those who hold this view believe that writing in an African language will allow writers not only to communicate effectively with their audiences (wa Thiong’o 1986:153), the majority of whom consist of peasants and workers, but also to preserve African traditions and cultures. On the other hand, most African writers write in English because it is a global language and as such, it allows them to reach audiences both at home and abroad. Also, in most cases, the writers have no choice but to write in English because of the availability of literary production infrastructures (publishers, book distributors, and literary awards and prizes). The varieties of English employed in creative writing in Southern Africa vary from author to author, much as they do elsewhere. Some write in a standardized English, but others employ an altered, nativized variety, to make the language, as Achebe (1975: 62) puts it, “carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.”
The various features of English described in this paper, including lexical transfer from African languages, discourse structure, word stress, hybridization, and so on, attest to the African cultural import into English. They show that Southern Africans have owned English to serve their communication needs.
Attitudes towards English in this part of the world can be described as being community specific or country specific. In South Africa, for instance, the perennial conflict between speakers of English and of Afrikaans, the two European‐heritage languages, provides the background against which attitudes towards English can be better understood. For the white Afrikaans‐speaking community, English has always been characterized as die vyand se taal, “the language of the enemy” (Branford 1996: 39). For this community, and despite the fact that some of its members acknowledge the instrumental value of English, the language is seen as a serious threat to Afrikaner identity and culture. This has become an even more widely held view in postapartheid South Africa, for Afrikaans no longer has the power it had during the apartheid era. As noted earlier, traditionally Afrikaans‐medium universities have been required to reform themselves and have now become bilingual universities, offering tuition in both Afrikaans and English, the latter to accommodate black students’ demand for English‐medium education. In the rest of English‐speaking Southern African countries, just as in South Africa, English has a status that no other language can match, especially given the wide range of functions English performs. It is the language of trade, diplomacy, and communication among the member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and of interpersonal communication among the diverse multilingual and multiracial populations. Because of its instrumental value and its status as a global language, English is widely held in high esteem in Southern Africa, both by those who are fluent in it and those who are not. Professionals including bankers, politicians, business men and women, and anyone else who can afford it invest in learning English mostly because of its instrumental value and to be perceived as modern.
In Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony with no colonial ties to Britain, but surrounded by six former British colonies as noted earlier, English competes with Portuguese in some of the higher domains of language use. Lopes (2004) reports that Mozambique’s registers of business and trade in the formal marketplace have been taken over by English. The influence of English in Mozambique will increase, though the interests of the elite, particularly the business elite, in promoting English for their interaction with the outside world will always be balanced by their continuing attachment to Portuguese as a language of national unity, and to indigenous African languages as symbols of ethnolinguistic identity (Lopes 2004). It must be noted, however, that despite the uses to which it is put both in former British colonies and other countries in Southern Africa, English has been perceived as the source of agony for some, but of ecstasy for others (Kachru 1996b). Branford (1996: 36) captures these two sides of English:
In agreement with Branford (1996), de Klerk (2002) also points out that “while English is seen by many as a medium of achieving and announcing independence and maturity, for many others English represents colonialism, power and elitism, and acts as a vehicle of values not always in harmony with local tradition and beliefs.” Language activists consider English to be the catalyst for language shift that has been taking place particularly in Africa’s urban centers, where highly educated parents encourage their children to speak only English in the home, at the expense of the indigenous languages. As a result, English is increasingly becoming a home language for children in elite families, with attendant language shift from African languages to English, especially in Africa’s urban centers. It is this trend that led Ngu͂gĩ wa Thiong’o (1993: 35) to describe English as “a language that flourishes on the graveyard of other people’s languages.”
This chapter has described the forms and functions of Southern African Englishes. With respect to the forms, Southern African Englishes have been influenced by the morphosyntactic features of the Bantu languages spoken in the region, among them Bemba, Chewa, Ndebele, Sotho, Swati, Tswana, and Zulu. In terms of the functions, Southern African Englishes serve all the functions presented in Kachru (1996a), the interpersonal, instrumental, regulative, and imaginative. With the advent of globalization, English now competes with such other European languages as Portuguese in Mozambique, a country with no colonial ties to Britain. There, English has taken over registers of business from Portuguese and is taught as a compulsory subject in the educational system including colleges and universities. The demise of apartheid and birth of democracy in South Africa have also contributed to the spread of English at the expense of both Afrikaans, its historical rival, and African languages in virtually all the institutions of the state including government and administration, the media, the defence force, and the educational system. Language practices in these institutions show that despite its constitutional commitment to multilingualism, South Africa has given preference to English since the country liberated itself from apartheid in 1994. Other former British colonies in the region have, just as has South Africa, adopted similar policies aimed at promoting use of major indigenous languages, particularly in the educational system. However, if language in education in the region is any indication, these policies have not been effectively implemented, since policy makers themselves clamour for English. The practices favour English to the detriment of other languages. English has become a much sought‐after commodity and one in which anyone who can afford it is eager to invest. Virtually all parents want their children to be educated through the medium of English, despite the criticism levelled at it as a remnant of colonialism and postcolonial domination. One last point is worth making. When two or more languages come into contact, as English and African languages have in Southern Africa, they have an impact on one another. One side of this contact, the impact of African languages on the sociolinguistic structure of Southern African Englishes, has widely been investigated, as is clear from the data and the literature presented in this chapter. The other side of this contact, the impact of English on the Bantu languages of Southern Africa, is as yet to be investigated.