The risks of sociolinguistic crossing and cross-overs: A retrospective from apartheid South Africa

Rajend Mesthrie

doi:10.5842/37-0-45

Abstract

This article discusses the reception of a new accent within a community, based on the norms of a former out-group. Today, 15 years into a non-racial democracy in South Africa crossover accents are unremarkable, as new peer groups and social networks have evolved amongst young middle-class students. Young Black people (including Indians and Coloureds) are to varying degrees accommodating to prestige norms formerly associated with middle-class speakers. The article recounts an incident from the early to mid-1980s that shows the complexities of adopting a cross-over accent. A young female student of Indian South African background speaking to a member of the same community in an institutional context using a prestige White accent found her request for assistance being rejected. The incident is examined in terms of findings in intercultural communication and sociolinguistic accommodation.

Highlights

This article discusses the reception of a new accent within a community, based on the norms of a former out-group
In this paper I wish to change the focus slightly to examine the dynamic between members of the same community expected to use a version of the same dialect, even though there is an alternative resource provided by the norms of the standard variety in the wider society
Speaker A begins in North Sotho, the unmarked code in Pretoria, trying to get access into a department store which is about to close for the day

Summary

Introduction

This article discusses the reception of a new accent within a community, based on the norms of a former out-group. The main focus of the field of intercultural communication is the potentially diverse cultural norms that are associated with different languages or ways of speaking the same language The former involves an implicit contrast between the structure and pragmatics of two languages - e.g. In this paper I wish to change the focus slightly to examine the dynamic between members of the same community expected (in the unmarked case) to use a version of the same dialect, even though there is an alternative resource provided by the norms of the standard (or other prestige) variety in the wider society. The key sociolinguistic frameworks of relevance, as I show later, are those of Giles (see Giles & Powesland 1975; Giles 2001) on speech accommodation, Myers-Scotton's (1993) markedness model of code switching and Blommaert's work (e.g. 1999) on ideology in pragmatics

Some relevant frameworks for understanding speech divergence

Inappropriate divergence: a cameo from apartheid South Africa

An analysis of pragmatic failure in inappropriate divergence

Conclusion - Crossing-over 25 years on