Abstract
Within the last twenty years, the use of a corpus for language research has become the sine qua non in many areas of linguistic enquiry. This trend is particularly evident in lexicogra-phy, a discipline which has become increasingly and overtly 'corpus-driven'. This article draws on research from a Master's project which involved the collection of a small corpus of Indian South African English (ISAE), an acknowledged component or sub-variety of South African English (SAE). The discussion highlights the importance of aiming for a balanced representation of the known sub-varieties of a language when compiling corpora for lexicographic and linguistic inves-tigation. Since ISAE is primarily an oral dialect, specific focus is given to the methodological chal-lenges involved in compiling a spoken corpus. Methodological insights from local as well as inter-national corpus research were used to guide and inform the process. These include the Xhosa Eng-lish Corpus, the New Zealand Corpus of Spoken English and the Hong Kong Corpus of Conversa-tional English. The various stages in the research process are described, together with explanations of how problems such as ways of corpus design, the selection of corpus contributors, the data-col-lection process and developing guidelines for consistency during the corpus compilation were addressed. The article provides a keyhole view of the main lexical and syntactic features of ISAE exemplified in the corpus and juxtaposes these against the backdrop of general SAE and trends in World English. The article concludes with a proposal for the collection of parallel corpora of other sub-varieties of SAE which will provide an objectively compiled repository of language in use to enable researchers to discern the linguistic features at the core and periphery of SAE. It is argued that the establishment of corpora of the various known sub-varieties of SAE could constitute an important step towards the creation of a truly representative large corpus of SAE and ultimately towards a better definition and understanding of SAE. Keywords: corpus, spoken corpus, design, south african english, sub-varieties, indian south african english, lexicography
Highlights
Opsomming Op weg na 'n korpus van Suid-Afrikaanse Engels: Die bymekaarbring van die subvariëteite
The umbrella-term 'World Englishes' provides a conceptual framework to accommodate the different varieties of English which have evolved from linguistic cross-fertilization caused by colonization, migration and trade, which resulted in the transplantation of the original 'strain' or variety
In the broader South African linguistic context, there has been a proposal to collect spoken corpora for nine of the official languages of South Africa (Allwood and Hendrickse 2003) and in terms of SAE in particular, much research has already been done towards a corpus of spoken Xhosa-English (De Klerk 2002a, 2003, 2006) which, it is hoped, will form part of a larger corpus of Black South African Englishes
Summary
Opsomming Op weg na 'n korpus van Suid-Afrikaanse Engels: Die bymekaarbring van die subvariëteite. Sub-corpora such as the ISAE data at the centre of this study would provide ready linguistic repositories for testing theories of language variety and for assessing the effect(s) of the country's official policy of desegregation since 1994 on ethnically-based taxonomies of SAE.
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