The unbearable lightness of being bilingual: English–Afrikaans language contact in South Africa

Abstract

This paper discusses McCormick’s sociolinguistic study Language in Cape Town’s District Six [McCormick, K., 2003. Language in Cape Town’s District Six. Oxford University Press, Oxford] and locates it within the fields of South African sociolinguistics and language contact studies. McCormick’s work raises pertinent questions about sociolinguistic historiography, fieldwork methodology, bilingualism, (socio-)linguistic meaning, and the permeability of linguistic boundaries in language contact. McCormick approaches bilingual speech first and foremost from a code-switching perspective, broadly combining Myers-Scotton’s markedness model with conversation–analysis approaches (Gumperz/Auer). However, there is also evidence in the data that conversational language use in this bilingual working-class community can be interpreted within the framework of mixed languages and bilingual convergence. This raises important questions about norm formation and stabilization in language contact situations, and about the diachronic trajectories of bilingual speech.