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- Title
LINGUISTIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF VARIATION IN THE EASTERN CAPE: COMPLEXITIES OF XHOSA LANGUAGE USE.
- Authors
Ström, Eva-Marie Bloom
- Abstract
The overall goal of this paper is to explore morphosyntactic variation in the Xhosa dialect cluster. It presents the results of a micro-variation project in which linguistic diversity of the Eastern Cape of South Africa is examined. It shows that regional variation in the Xhosa dialect cluster is minimal and that many older forms and sounds that have previously been reported on are no longer in use. With a specific focus on morphosyntactic variation, the paper gives examples from a corpus of recorded, transcribed and glossed speech collected across the Eastern Cape. It is argued that spontaneous speech is crucial in analysing morpho-syntactic variation when it is on a finegrained, intralinguistic level. The paper gives a detailed overview of previous publications on the dialects of the area and relates this to current findings based on the recordings. It is shown that the decline in dialectal differences does not correlate with a decrease in the linguistic identity which is connected to separate clans and kingdoms. The dwindling use of regional variants is explained by a long history of personal mobility, standardization and schooling. The primary contribution of the paper is to show that regional or dialectal variation on all linguistic levels is synchronically very fine-grained. It also contributes to our understanding of the linguistic complexities of the Nguni subgroup of Bantu languages. It is concluded that the differences reportedly experienced between standard Xhosa and the language spoken at home are not due to regional variation, and that their causes should be sought elsewhere, such as perhaps in an outdated standard.
- Subjects
EASTERN Cape (South Africa); XHOSA language; MORPHOSYNTAX; NGUNI (African people); LINGUISTIC analysis; LANGUAGE ability
- Publication
Studia Orientalia (0039-3282), 2018, Vol 6, p90
- ISSN
0039-3282
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.23993/store.75138