The international comprehensibility of varieties of South African English

Abstract

The justification for the continued use of a high status (‘international’) variety of English in education and the media in South Africa is that re-standardizing to a local variety will result in South Africans becoming incomprehensible to the rest of the world. The study challenges the truth of this statement while it attempts to devise a more contextualized research methodology in the area of intelligibility and comprehensibility studies. It concludes that, although the comprehensibility tests devised for this study prove that South African Englishes are comprehensible internationally, comprehensibility and intelligibility cannot be reduced to linguistic features of a language. The results of the study imply that the use of ‘non-standard’ varieties of language in education does not necessarily preclude international communication possibilities. Furthermore, teachers should be trained to avoid stigmatizing the varieties their students bring to school. The study also points the way to further developments in research methodology.