Rajend Mesthrie
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 412259 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Rajend Mesthrie |
| NOMBRES | Rajend |
| APELLIDO | Mesthrie |
| FIRMA | MESTHRIE R |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6338-6076 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 74 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 124 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 72 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1987 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Towards a model of world Englishes and multilingual variation
Drawing on research on multilingualism in South Africa and India, this paper attempts to integrate world Englishes studies and variationist sociolinguistics; in other words, to fill in a missing dialogue between Braj Kachru and William Labov. The classic studies of variationism have been undertaken in large western centres in which the hegemony of one language is largely accepted. In the postcolonial world elsewhere, language functions and status…
Speaking Xhosa multilingually
Although code-switching has been quite well studied as a worldwide phenomenon, closer attention to effects on the more localized language involved is needed, especially in the repertoires of younger, well-educated speakers speaking in a multilingual mode. We argue that their language shows creativity going well beyond older instances of borrowing and code-switching into a “third space” grammar, which shows an active and creative synthesis of at l…
Encounters with Xenophobia
This article focuses on the fraught relation between xenophobia and language use and learning in the South African sociolinguistic context. It begins with the issue of labelling and the linguistic drawing of boundaries that speak to the phenomena of “othering” and xenophobia. It then proceeds to aspects of diasporic communication and identity negotiation as revealed in language learning, language crossing, and translanguaging in this fraught cont…
Indenture in Language
This paper affords an overview of the linguistic resources that indentured labourers (1860–1911) brought with them from different parts of India, as well as of the linguistic adaptations evident in the South African forms of Tamil, Bhojpuri-Hindi, Urdu and Telugu. These changes pertain to the coalescence of different but closely related Indian dialects to form distinct plantation varieties of each of these, as well as to the adoption of words fro…
A chain shift in Indo-Aryan, with special reference to Gujarati dialects
This paper explores a possible chain shift in Gujarati dialects, involving the consonants k , kh , c , ch , s , ś , h , ḥ , V̤ , and ∅ (where ś denotes IPA [ʃ], ḥ voiceless [h], V̤ a murmured vowel, and ∅ “zero”). The chain shift can be discerned by comparing the colloquial forms in the regional dialects with the standard Gujarati forms and those of Central Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi. This comparison yields the following correspondences, giv…
Colony, post‐colony and world Englishes in the South African context
This article discusses the full implications of colonialism and its aftermath in coming to terms with the phenomena of world Englishes. Worldwide movements have brought to the fore the persistence of post‐colonial hierarchies, inequalities and forms of domination well beyond the pre‐colonial and colonial contexts that gave rise to them. South Africa is well suited as a site for researching sociolinguistic questions over the implications of these …
Sociolinguistic patterns and names
This article unlocks the complex indexicalities pertaining to names in a multilayered diasporic field, one in which descendants from different ancestral areas of a former homeland (India) have merged loosely into a new community (in South Africa). The focus falls on large-scale innovations in officially registered personal names over a period of 150 years. A mixture of qualitative and quantitative analysis of over 2,300 names shows the influence …
Práticas de língua e mudança linguística entre migrantes transnacionais para a África do Sul, 1990-2020
Este artigo revisa pesquisas sobre o uso da língua entre migrantes transnacionais da África do Sul desde 1990, tomando isso como um ponto de partida conveniente como o ano do primeiro anúncio oficial da renúncia ao apartheid, levando ao seu desmantelamento legal em 1994. Considerando que a África do Sul havia incentivado a migração europeia para o país, a migração limitada da Ásia (principalmente de Taiwan) e uma migração circular controlada de t…
Contacts and contexts
This paper focuses on (a) a period of forced and semi-forced migration to newly established colonies under slavery and indenture in the era of European imperialism; and (b) a post-independence period of economic migration involving voluntary movements of large numbers of individuals to those colonies. It will show that there is no one-size-fits-all outcome regarding the linguistics of migration. Rather, the patterns of migration matter greatly. T…
A Handbook of Varieties of English
The Handbook ‚Varieties of English‘ is by far the most thorough reference work on phonology and the first-ever comprehensive overview of the morphology and syntax of varieties of English in the world. Survey Articles The books feature descriptive survey articles that are authored by widely acclaimed specialists in the field and that cover all main national standard varieties, distinctive regional, ethnic, and social varieties, major contact varie…
Cape Town Gujarati and its relation to Gujarati dialectology
This paper has two purposes. Firstly, it provides a bird’s eye view of the characteristics of a variety of Gujarati in diaspora, viz. that spoken in Cape Town, South Africa for almost 150 years. Secondly it focusses on one notable feature, viz. the prominence of retroflexes over dentals, and connects this with other dialects of Gujarati in India and with Western Indo-Aryan. We analyse the speech of 32 speakers born or brought up in South Africa, …
Remembering Tom MacArthur and David Graddol
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Indian English in theory and action
This tribute to the work of Braj B. Kachru covers three themes. First, I present an overview of Kachru's career and contribution to the field of world Englishes (WE) and language contact. In the second and main section I present an overview of Indian English – Language and culture , a booklet in the Lonely Planet language products series from 1968 (Lonely Planet, 2008). I argue that this popular piece of work is a fitting – if unwitting – tribute…
Fanakalo as a mining language in South Africa
Fanakalo pidgin rose to prominence when it was selected for use as the lingua franca of the highly multilingual mines of South Africa. This article examines the properties of Fanakalo as a mining language, in contrast to its uses on farms, suburban households and in urban employment. Fanakalo has evolved a special register of technical terms pertaining to the mining industry from various sources (chiefly Zulu, English and Afrikaans). This article…
Slavery, indentured work, and language
This chapter deals with the slave trade and its consequences for language maintenance and new language formation. It examines slavery in the light of migration and summarises current linguistic thinking about the origins and development of pidgins and creoles. The chapter surveys the semi-forced movements of indentured labourers from South Asia into European colonies in different parts of the world, often into the very terrains from which slaves …
Braj B. Kachru (1932–2016)
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Kokni in Cape Town and the Sociolinguistics of Transnationalism
This article continues the initial documentary work on South African Kokni begun in Mesthrie, Kulkarni-Joshi and Paradkar (2016). The language (known as Konkani in India) has been in existence for over 125 years in South Africa, with Cape Town as its main base. We characterise the extent to which the language is still used and the social circumstances under which this takes place. We highlight historical research on the strong transnational mobil…
Class, gender, and substrate erasure in sociolinguistic change
4 OF THE MAIN TEXT.Final environment, for 'schwa'.The environment does not differentiate subtypes for schwa, having just 'a' (n = 219).C-forest diagram given below, followed by conditional inference trees and results of linear mixed-effects regression model.sort(coconoco.cforest.varimp
Class, gender, and substrate erasure in sociolinguistic change
This article analyzes the sociophonetic dynamics of the acquisition of a prestige variety of English in post-apartheid South Africa. New economic and educational opportunities have seen the rapid growth of a Black middle class, whose younger members have increasingly come into contact with what used to be ‘(L1) White South African English’. The article documents the differences among younger Black peoples’ English from the traditional L2 of their…
A Regional and Social Dialectology of the Bath Vowel in South African English
This paper provides the beginnings of a pan–South African English dialectology, characterizing five cities (Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Kimberley, Johannesburg, and Durban) and four ethnicities (Black, Colored, Indian, and White), via a single vowel, BATH (or /ɑ:/). From interviews with 200 selected speakers, 5553 tokens were subjected to acoustic analysis via PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2010), yielding bivariate data on vowel quality. Statistical a…
English in India and South Africa
This article offers a comparison of the history of English in India and South Africa, with special reference to its rise as a second language. As far as external history is concerned both territories show investment in a language whose use has long outlasted the colonial era, despite the concerns of leaders and scholars with a pro-indigenous language stance. The article focuses on comparing the grammatical characteristics of the second language v…
‘When you hang out with the guys they keep you in style’
The collection of South African urban language phenomena called Tsotsitaal, Scamtho, Ringas (in short ‘Tsotsitaals’) etc, have been described differently as code-switching, mixed languages, or essentially slang vocabulary. These descriptions however, fail to acknowledge the centrality of performance to these phenomena. Tsotsitaals draw on extra-linguistic modes of identity performance such as body language, clothing, and other facets of what coul…
Englishes in a multilingual South Africa
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Where does a New English dictionary stop? On the making of the Dictionary of South African Indian English
This paper reflects on the recently published Dictionary of South African Indian English (Mesthrie, 2010, henceforth DSAIE ) in terms of the decisions that have to be made over content in a New English variety. ‘New English’ is used in the commonly accepted sense of a variety that has arisen as a second language in a multilingual context, mainly under British colonialism, but which has gained an identity of its own on account of its characteristi…
Slang registers, code-switching and restructured urban varieties in South Africa
This paper examines the status of an informal urban variety in Cape Town known as Tsotsitaal. Similar varieties, going by a plethora of names (Flaaitaal, Iscamtho, Ringas) have been described in other South African cities, especially Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban (see also Sheng in Kenyan cities). This paper seeks to describe the essential characteristics of Cape Town Tsotsitaal, which is based on Xhosa, and to argue for its continuity with s…
Socio-phonetics and social change
This paper examines the degree of sociolinguistic change in the English of young middle-class South Africans of different ethnic backgrounds in relation to new post-apartheid opportunities and friendships. Once tightly controlled, social networks of young people of middle-class background are now deracialising. The paper examines whether young people of the major ethnic groups, Black, Coloured and Indian, are simply adopting prestige White middle…
Class, gender, and substrate erasure in sociolinguistic change
This article analyzes the sociophonetic dynamics of the acquisition of a prestige variety of English in post-apartheid South Africa. New economic and educational opportunities have seen the rapid growth of a Black middle class, whose younger members have increasingly come into contact with what used to be ‘(L1) White South African English’. The article documents the differences among younger Black peoples’ English from the traditional L2 of their…
Anti-deletions in an L2 grammar
This paper offers a unified account of the syntactic “deviations” found in a second language variety of English, viz. Black South African English (BlSAfE). Most writing on the topic has been content to supply lists of non-standard features which are thought to be diagnostic of the variety. This paper aims to characterise the syntax of the variety via its recurrent properties, rather than as a superset of unrelated features. In this regard I use t…
Words across worlds
Towards a Grammar of Proto South African English
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Ethnicity, substrate and place
This paper presents information on the regional characteristics of two of South Africa's five major varieties of English: viz. those of its Coloured and Indian communities in five cities: Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Kimberley. It proposes that as far as the variable (t) is concerned, and by extension (d), these two “interior” social groupings show regional variation of a more robust kind than that of the Black majority an…
New Englishes and the native speaker debate
World Englishes and the multilingual history of English
Traditional histories of English (e.g.,Baugh and Cable, 1993) present a mostly unilinear account of the language that privileges the standard in Britain and to a lesser extent, the US. Most other varieties (e.g., in Australia, Nigeria or India) are treated as appendages to this history, of interest mainly for their lexical innovations. At the same time, studies of New Englishes (e.g.,Plattet al., 1984) have also promulgated this separateness in h…
Language Shift, Cultural Change and Identity Retention
Language shift is not a new phenomenon in South Africa: the most significant shifts in the last few centuries have been from Khoe-San languages and Malay to Afrikaans in the Western Cape's Coloured communities and from Indian languages to English among the KwaZulu-Natal Indian communities. This article will focus on the latter, documenting the fate of Indian languages over their 147-year history in South Africa. In this history issues concerning …
Mock languages and symbolic power
This paper examines the text of a popular radio series in Natal in the 1940s, Applesammy and Naidoo by Ray Rich, with a view to adding to the historical data base on Indian South African English. In order to ascertain its reliability as a source of colloquial data a comparison is made between direct speech of the Indian characters in the series and tape recordings of pre-basilectal speakers (the least proficient within Indian South African Englis…
Syntactic variation in language shift
This article examines syntactic variation in an English dialect that has emerged from the process of language shift. South African Indian English has a wide variety of relative clauses that can be categorized as follows: (a) standard, (b) almost standard, (c) substrate influenced, (d) discourse governed. Of some interest is the occasional appearance of left-branching relative clauses and correlatives normally associated with object-verb (OV) lang…
Imagint excusations
This case study of the English of early missionaries operating in South Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century serves three main functions. Firstly, it characterizes the interlanguages of some German and Dutch missionaries, which are interesting in their own. right, historically and theoretically. Secondly, it points out the disparity between the actual patterns of use we find in the missionary letters and characterizations of their a…
Koineization in the Bhojpuri-Hindi diaspora - with special reference to South Africa
Article Koineization in the Bhojpuri–Hindi diaspora ― with special reference to South Africa was published on January 1, 1993 in the journal International Journal of the Sociology of Language (volume 1993, issue 99)
English in India and South Africa
This article offers a comparison of the history of English in India and South Africa, with special reference to its rise as a second language. As far as external history is concerned both territories show investment in a language whose use has long outlasted the colonial era, despite the concerns of leaders and scholars with a pro-indigenous language stance. The article focuses on comparing the grammatical characteristics of the second language v…
Necessary Versus Sufficient Conditions for Using New Languages in South African Higher Education
This paper critically examines one particular issue against the background of changes in South Africa's higher education system consequent upon the advent of a non-racial democracy – the possibility of implementing multilingual instructional polices that include indigenous African languages in its universities. Currently, a great deal of applied linguistic work is being carried out on the creation of word lists and dictionaries, via translation a…
The World Englishes Paradigm and Contact Linguistics
This paper argues for a greater degree of rapprochement between the fields of world Englishes and Contact Linguistics. New Englishes are after all contact varieties, in the broad sense of the term and hold insights for creolistics, just as the latter has much to offer world Englishes research. One of the phases of 'refurbishing the foundations' is to pay close attention to the establishment of individual world Englishes. This paper focuses on the…
Toward a lexicon of South African Indian English
The aim of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, it reports on the lexical characteristics of a hitherto little studied 'New English' variety-South African Indian English. It points to lexical affinities with, and divergences from, other varieties of English in South Africa, at least one of which has been well studied in terms of its lexis. It also focuses on lexical similarities between English in India and the South African dialect under scrutiny. P…
Sociolinguistic patterns and names
This article unlocks the complex indexicalities pertaining to names in a multilayered diasporic field, one in which descendants from different ancestral areas of a former homeland (India) have merged loosely into a new community (in South Africa). The focus falls on large-scale innovations in officially registered personal names over a period of 150 years. A mixture of qualitative and quantitative analysis of over 2,300 names shows the influence …
Fanakalo as a mining language in South Africa
Fanakalo pidgin rose to prominence when it was selected for use as the lingua franca of the highly multilingual mines of South Africa. This article examines the properties of Fanakalo as a mining language, in contrast to its uses on farms, suburban households and in urban employment. Fanakalo has evolved a special register of technical terms pertaining to the mining industry from various sources (chiefly Zulu, English and Afrikaans). This article…
A Regional and Social Dialectology of the Bath Vowel in South African English
This paper provides the beginnings of a pan–South African English dialectology, characterizing five cities (Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Kimberley, Johannesburg, and Durban) and four ethnicities (Black, Colored, Indian, and White), via a single vowel, BATH (or /ɑ:/). From interviews with 200 selected speakers, 5553 tokens were subjected to acoustic analysis via PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2010), yielding bivariate data on vowel quality. Statistical a…
Public lecture series on 150 years of Indian history in South Africa
This lecture series, convened by Rajend Mesthrie in 2010 (mainly), was intended to provide academic input to the commemoration of the arrival of Indians starting in 1860 to the then British colony
Necessary Versus Sufficient Conditions for Using New Languages in South African Higher Education
Reflections on World Englishes
Assessing representations of South African Indian English in writing
This article examines three representations of South African Indian English in print: The Adventures of Applesammy and Naidoo (1946) by Ray Rich; The Lahnee's Pleasure (c. 1972) by Ronnie Govender; and The Wedding (2001) by Imraan Coovadia. The use of dialect is a defining feature of all three texts. I show that the tools provided by variation theory are particularly useful in the analysis of literature that uses direct speech to portray characte…
Endogeny versus contact revisited
From OV to VO in Language Shift
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Toward a lexicon of South African Indian English
The aim of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, it reports on the lexical characteristics of a hitherto little studied 'New English' variety-South African Indian English. It points to lexical affinities with, and divergences from, other varieties of English in South Africa, at least one of which has been well studied in terms of its lexis. It also focuses on lexical similarities between English in India and the South African dialect under scrutiny. P…
The Origins of Fanagalo
This paper examines, and refutes, the currently most popular hypothesis concerning the origin of Fanagalo, namely, that it arose on the plantation fields of Natal among indentured East Indian migrants who arrived there from 1860 onwards. Can a pidgin be initiated by a group of migrants from differing linguistic backgrounds in a plantation situation, and still remain in widespread use without showing any substrate influences? If the Indian origin …
Syntactic variation in language shift
This article examines syntactic variation in an English dialect that has emerged from the process of language shift. South African Indian English has a wide variety of relative clauses that can be categorized as follows: (a) standard, (b) almost standard, (c) substrate influenced, (d) discourse governed. Of some interest is the occasional appearance of left-branching relative clauses and correlatives normally associated with object-verb (OV) lang…
Did the butler do it
South African Indian English (SAIE) refers to a stabilised L1 variety of New English that is spoken by descendants of Indian immigrants who came to work mainly in the sugar plantations of Natal in South Africa. Although the first immigrants had no knowledge of English, it had become the lingua franca amongst a majority of Indians by the 1950s. Since then, English has gone through the processes of nativisation and has finally been established as a…
Nineteenth-century Attestations of English-Afrikaans Code-mixing in the Cape
(1993). Nineteenth-century Attestations of English-Afrikaans Code-mixing in the Cape. Language Matters: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 47-61
English in South Africa
A discussion of the history, status, major features and general properties of English as it is used alongside Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu and other southern African languages
Koineization in the Bhojpuri-Hindi diaspora - with special reference to South Africa
Article Koineization in the Bhojpuri–Hindi diaspora ― with special reference to South Africa was published on January 1, 1993 in the journal International Journal of the Sociology of Language (volume 1993, issue 99)
English in Language Shift
In his important new study, Rajend Mesthrie examines the rise of a new variety of English among Indian migrant workers indentured on the plantations of Natal in South Africa, and among their descendants. Considering the historical background to, and linguistic consequences of, language shift in an immigrant context, he draws significant parallels between second-language acquisition and the processes of pidginisation and creolisation. In particula…
Towards a Grammar of Proto South African English
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Imagint excusations
This case study of the English of early missionaries operating in South Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century serves three main functions. Firstly, it characterizes the interlanguages of some German and Dutch missionaries, which are interesting in their own. right, historically and theoretically. Secondly, it points out the disparity between the actual patterns of use we find in the missionary letters and characterizations of their a…
Words across worlds
Endogeny versus contact revisited
Mock languages and symbolic power
This paper examines the text of a popular radio series in Natal in the 1940s, Applesammy and Naidoo by Ray Rich, with a view to adding to the historical data base on Indian South African English. In order to ascertain its reliability as a source of colloquial data a comparison is made between direct speech of the Indian characters in the series and tape recordings of pre-basilectal speakers (the least proficient within Indian South African Englis…
The World Englishes Paradigm and Contact Linguistics
This paper argues for a greater degree of rapprochement between the fields of world Englishes and Contact Linguistics. New Englishes are after all contact varieties, in the broad sense of the term and hold insights for creolistics, just as the latter has much to offer world Englishes research. One of the phases of 'refurbishing the foundations' is to pay close attention to the establishment of individual world Englishes. This paper focuses on the…
New Zealand English
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Gullah
We’ve built this digital research platform to provide academics everywhere with fast, stable and secure digital access to our library of over 110,000 scholarly books and 800,000 journal articles. We’ve tested the platform in close cooperation with leading academic institutions. If you have any questions or you notice something doesn’t quite work as it should, please visit our Help/FAQ page and let us know.
Assessing representations of South African Indian English in writing
This article examines three representations of South African Indian English in print: The Adventures of Applesammy and Naidoo (1946) by Ray Rich; The Lahnee's Pleasure (c. 1972) by Ronnie Govender; and The Wedding (2001) by Imraan Coovadia. The use of dialect is a defining feature of all three texts. I show that the tools provided by variation theory are particularly useful in the analysis of literature that uses direct speech to portray characte…
Putting back the horse before the cart
A common assumption in studies of English world-wide is that speakers of an L2 frequently rely on the orthographic form of words in settling upon their pronunciation. I call this the “spelling form hypothesis”. This paper critically examines the assumptions behind this hypothesis and shows them to be implausible, and in fact fallacious for advanced interlanguages and fluent sub-varieties of a second language. Using data from Black South African E…
Subordinate immigrant languages and language endangerment
This article describes the language dilemmas of forced or semi-forced migrants made to labour in a new territory as they try to integrate into a new territory and gain a stronger economic foothold. Insofar as they are not in control of their socio-political and physical environment, their dilemmas are different from those of indigenous people and of superordinate (colonising) migrant communities. The main focus falls on two sets of such subordina…
Anti-deletions in an L2 grammar
This paper offers a unified account of the syntactic “deviations” found in a second language variety of English, viz. Black South African English (BlSAfE). Most writing on the topic has been content to supply lists of non-standard features which are thought to be diagnostic of the variety. This paper aims to characterise the syntax of the variety via its recurrent properties, rather than as a superset of unrelated features. In this regard I use t…
World Englishes and the multilingual history of English
Traditional histories of English (e.g.,Baugh and Cable, 1993) present a mostly unilinear account of the language that privileges the standard in Britain and to a lesser extent, the US. Most other varieties (e.g., in Australia, Nigeria or India) are treated as appendages to this history, of interest mainly for their lexical innovations. At the same time, studies of New Englishes (e.g.,Plattet al., 1984) have also promulgated this separateness in h…
Reflections on World Englishes
Braj B. Kachru. 2005. Asian Englishes
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A bird's eye view of Tamil in South Africa
This article provides a sociolinguistic overview of Tamil, the language that once had the greatest number of speakers amongst the Indian South Africans. It ocuses on the following four aspects of the life cycle of the language in South Africa: (a) origins and demography, (b) dialect features, (c) changes arising out of contact with South African languages and (d) obsolescence. The article concentrates on the colloquial variety of Tamil, rather th…
Linguistics (60 obras) · Multilingual Education and Policy (45 obras) · Sociology (44 obras) · History (41 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (36 obras) · Philosophy (35 obras) · Computer Science (28 obras) · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity (22 obras) · Geography (19 obras) · Political science (19 obras)