Truncated Multilingualism or Language Shift? An Examination of Language Use in Intimate Domains in a New Non-racial Working Class Township in South Africa

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Truncated Multilingualism or Language Shift?An Examination of Language Use in IntimateDomains in a New Non-racial Working ClassTownship in South AfricaDr Charlyn Dyers aa Department of Linguistics , University of the Western Cape , Bellville,South AfricaPublished online: 19 Dec 2008.

To cite this article: Dr Charlyn Dyers (2008) Truncated Multilingualism or Language Shift? An Examination ofLanguage Use in Intimate Domains in a New Non-racial Working Class Township in South Africa, Journal ofMultilingual and Multicultural Development, 29:2, 110-126, DOI: 10.2167/jmmd533.0

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Truncated Multilingualism or LanguageShift? An Examination of Language Usein Intimate Domains in a New Non-racialWorking Class Township in South Africa

Charlyn DyersDepartment of Linguistics, University of the Western Cape, Bellville, SouthAfrica

The dominance of English in particular domains of language use in South Africa,such as higher education and the economy, has led to the fear that other languagesmay be threatened by an increasing shift to English in all domains, especially amongthe young. However, this paper reveals the strong vitality of the mother tongues inthe intimate domains and increasing multilingualism becoming the norm in newshared spaces.

doi: 10.2167/jmmd533.0

Keywords: domains, multilingualism, space, marginalisation, South Africa

IntroductionThe broad aims of this paper are as follows:

. to provide a sociohistorical context for language practices in a new non-racial working class township in South Africa;

. to examine what languages dominate in intimate domains of languageuse among specific families in this space; and

. to argue that there is a vital and vibrant multilingualism present in thenew spaces shared by working class South Africans.

By way of illustration, I begin with a narrative of one township teenager’slanguage use in her intimate domains.

Sophie (not her real name) is a 15-year-old Coloured (mixed race)teenager living in Wesbank Township, Cape Town. She is in Grade 10 ather local high school. Her mother tongue is Afrikaans, but she usesAfrikaans, English and Xhosa in her intimate domains, depending onher relationship with those with whom she interacts in these domains.Her father, a Xhosa mother-tongue speaker, was raised in the rural townof Upington, where he acquired Afrikaans, the dominant language ofthis town. He completed his matriculation. His wife, a mother-tongueAfrikaans speaker, was raised in the mainly Afrikaans-speaking Suther-land, where she met her husband. She attended high school up to Grade9. When Sophie prays, she does so in Afrikaans, but when she talks toherself, she mixes Xhosa and Afrikaans. She reports dreaming in both

0143-4632/08/02 110-17 $20.00/0 – 2008 C. DyersJ. OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT Vol. 29, No. 2, 2008

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English and Afrikaans. In the domain of the home, she mainly speaksAfrikaans to her parents and brother. However, the youngest child, agirl, is addressed in English because the family took a decision (as aresult of pressure from her mother’s English-speaking relatives in ElsiesRiver, a suburb of Cape Town) to raise the youngest child in English.This youngest child is also acquiring Xhosa from a cousin. When Sophievisits her closest family members, she uses all three languages depend-ing on the persons with whom she is interacting. She uses Xhosa whenshe visits her paternal grandmother, with whom she has a polite but nottoo close relationship. With her mother’s family as well as her boyfriend,she tends to use mainly English, sometimes mixed with Afrikaans. Onthe streets of Wesbank, she uses all three languages with ease, switchingto Xhosa or English with Xhosa mother-tongue speakers, but usingmainly Afrikaans with her friends. Sophie’s family attends a churchwhere Afrikaans predominates, but where those who do not speak thelanguage are accommodated by a switch to English.

At first reading, the above case study could simply be a description of anormal multilingual family’s language use in informal, intimate settings.However, viewed against the sociohistorical context of South Africa, suchfamilies are the exception rather than the norm. In a society formerly markedby the rigorous, enforced separation of people of different races,1 Sophie’sworking class family forms part of a small but growing minority of cross-linguistic, crosscultural families. The existence of such families is of interest toresearchers across a broad spectrum of disciplines, because racial groupings(Black, White, Coloured and Indian, to use the broadest pre-democracycategories2) have remained by and large distinct and separate 12 years afterthe country’s first democratic elections (Deumert et al., 2005; Parnell, 2004). Inaddition, post-democratic South Africa is marked by deep social divisionsbetween the poor and those who are better off. With limited or no routes out ofpoverty and inequality, it might be argued that the sociocultural identities ofthe poor and working class have remained largely unchanged since theintroduction of democracy in 1994. What then happens to language andidentity when people from different ethnolinguistic backgrounds in a countrylike South Africa get married and raise families? How is language used in suchfamilies? What choices do they make and what influences these choices?

As there is an unassailable link between people’s languages and theiridentities (Appel & Muysken, 1987; Dyers, 2001; Edwards, 1995; Tabouret-Keller, 1998), one of the clearest signals of group and individual identitywould surely be the languages that dominate in intimate domains of languageuse, such as the home and in conversations with family, neighbours and closefriends. This paper is an attempt to capture what these languages are in thefamilies of a particular group of high school pupils. They live in a fairly newmultiracial township on the periphery of Cape Town called Wesbank andattend the local high school, Wesbank High. The research reported on here isbased on three years of research into patterns of language attitudes, choice anduse among high school pupils in the township by teams of researchers of the

Truncated Multilingualism or Language Shift? 111

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Culture, Language and Identity Project at the University of the Western Cape(Blommaert et al., 2005c; Dyers, 2004).

ContextWith the exception of the province of Gauteng, which is frequently

described as an area of linguistic confluence where no particular languagedominates, most of the 11 South African provinces have at least one dominantindigenous African language.3 In South Africa’s Western Cape Province, thethree dominant languages are Afrikaans, Xhosa and English. Afrikaans is alanguage that developed out of Dutch, Malay and particular indigenouslanguages (Roberge, 1995), while Xhosa is one of the indigenous Africanlanguages, originating from the Eastern Cape Province. The 2001 SouthAfrican Census reveals the following distribution of the three main mothertongues among the population of the Western Cape: Afrikaans 41%, Xhosa29% and English 28%. However, English functions as the main commonlanguage between the different groups and is the dominant second languagetaught at school. In addition, parents of all races are increasingly enrollingtheir children at schools where English is the main medium of instruction.

The majority population of the Western Cape is the mixed-race Colouredgroup, which is largely Afrikaans-speaking, although many members of thisgroup are also strongly bilingual in Afrikaans and English. Apart from theirhistorical links to the Western Cape as descendants of South Africa’s earliestinhabitants, the Khoina and the San, the Western Cape was also defined as aColoured labour preference area until the late 1980s. The Group Areas Act4

also ensured that contact between the Coloured and Xhosas was kept to aminimum. Since the early 1990s, Xhosas have been moving into the provincein significant numbers (Bekker, 2002). Cape Town, the main city of the WesternCape Province of South Africa, records an inflow of approximately 50,000 newarrivals each year, mainly from the impoverished rural areas of the EasternCape Province (Deumert et al., 2005: 306).

The working class community of Wesbank (established in 1999), where ourresearch took place, is one of the first formal low-cost housing developmentsin the new South Africa, where groups formerly housed separately by law cannow live together (Dyers, 2004). Despite the provision of housing and basicservices, the community is characterised by poverty and deprivation. Gang-sterism, drug and alcohol abuse are rife, as are illiteracy and child abuse. Asurvey conducted in 2001 put the unemployment figure at 61%, and there areindications that this has increased (Foundation for Contemporary Research,2002: 13). According to the Foundation for Contemporary Research’s socio-economic profile of the Wesbank Area (2002: 12), the main causal factors can beattributed to ‘low incomes for those who have work, huge skills deficits thatstem from the historically low levels of education and a lack of opportunitiesfor those who are unemployed but are seeking work’. The current demo-graphics of the area (Havenga: Metropole East Education Provision Plan, 2006)show that, of a total population of approximately 29,000 people, approxi-mately 73% are mixed-race, mainly Afrikaans-speaking Coloured people, 25%are Xhosa people and a further 2% are White, Asian or foreigners from other

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parts of Africa like Somalia, Nigeria and The Congo. The township consists ofsmall housing units, a high school, three primary schools and a supermarket.There are no public amenities such as a community centre, parks or sportsfields and those who work mainly travel to the more prosperous suburbs ofCape Town by minibus taxi, which is the most common and cheapest form ofpublic transport.

It can be argued that everyone in Wesbank is a migrant from elsewhere, andthat each member of this ‘created’ community now has to negotiate this newspace and their group and individual identity within it. It is a community stillstruggling to come together, with various factions claiming leadership atdifferent times. Such social networks as there are consist of churches, informaldrinking places known as ‘yards’ or ‘shebeens’ and various groupingssupported by a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that offera range of interventions to assist the community. For the youth, given the lackof amenities in the township, schools constitute the primary social networkswhere they are exposed daily to different varieties of the principal languagesof Wesbank. Together with their other social networks like places of worship,neighbours and friends, the school clearly exerts a powerful influence on thepersonal and linguistic identities of the youth.

The bulk of our research was carried out at Wesbank High School5 in acontrolled and safe environment. However, 10 hours of informal observationwere also carried out over five days at the main shopping area and taxi rank in2007, and three family homes were visited in 2005.

Terms of ReferenceThe main focus of this paper is to find out what languages are used in

intimate domains like the home, and in interactions with various familymembers and friends in one recently established South African township. Theunderlying question is to find out whether such languages continue to remaina vital part of people’s lives and identities despite the presence of anotherpowerful language, or whether even in intimate domains there are signs of anincreasing shift to the dominant language of power. In the case of South Africa,it is indisputable that the dominant language of power is English. Despite thedemocratic ideal of multilingualism, the period since 1994 has been marked by‘ . . . a very real increased dominance of English in social, economic, political,and educational spheres’ (Reagan, 2004: 108). But there are other spheres ordomains in which Afrikaans and the indigenous South African languagescontinue to play important roles in people’s sociocultural identities, and thesedomains should not be underestimated as potential areas of languagemaintenance and growth.

A useful definition of the concept ‘domain’ can be found in Boxer (2002: 4):‘In sociolinguistics, a domain refers to a sphere of life in which verbal and non-verbal interactions occur’. Domains include the areas of work, family, schooland other educational institutions, circle of friends and wider communication.In multilingual societies like South Africa, one language or language variety ismore likely to be used in specific domains than another. Ferguson (1959) wasthe first to label this phenomenon as diglossia, to explain choices made


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between two varieties of a linguistic system by a speech community. Heidentified a formal variety used for high functions, and a vernacular orpopular form used for low functions. As this paper hopes to demonstrate, theuse of one variety or language for high functions does not necessarily implythat it will edge out the vernacular languages in other domains, as long asthose vernaculars continue to be a symbol of the solidarity between itsspeakers and enjoy a particular social status within a community.

A further development of the concept of domains is Blommaert et al.’snotion (2005b) of ‘dialogic places’. They base this notion on Bakhtin’s theory ofthe dialogic nature of all aspects of language � that all utterances anticipate anaudience, and a response (Bakhtin, 1981). ‘Dialogic places’ can consist of morethan one ‘interactional regime’ and of more than one language. In other words,a domain like the family can utilise more than one language or languagevariety depending on the topic being discussed and the person to whom one istalking. In addition, the domain of the family ‘ . . . is fundamental to thebuilding of identity through language socialization’ (Boxer, 2002: 4). Thelanguage or languages through which children are socialised initially withinthe family domain must therefore play a crucial role, not only in shaping theirpersonal identities, but also in ensuring the continued vitality of suchlanguages. The vitality of any language can be measured according to thenumber of functions served by a language or language variety, as well as theimportance or status of those functions (Edwards, 1995: 100�101). Furtherindications are the social status of the language or variety within thecommunity and the solidarity between its speakers. In addition, researcherslike Yamamoto (2005) and Tannenbaum (2003) argue that family interventionscan help to ensure the continued vitality of vernacular languages or increasethe pace at which those languages are edged out by others.

Tannenbaum’s study, based on immigrant families in Australia, revealedthat immigrant parents showed a greater tendency towards the use of andpreference for the mother tongue in intimate interactions, as opposed to thepublic domain where English was dominant. She writes: ‘Most researchersagree that daily intergenerational use of a minority language is crucial for itssurvival, both at the individual and family level as well as at community level’(Tannenbaum, 2003: 375). Yamamoto’s study was carried out with a smallgroup of families in Japan whom he labels cross-native/community languagefamilies (CNCL), in which the parents, like the parents of some of theteenagers in my study, had different native languages, one of which wasthe mainstream language of the community. These families displayed the sametendency towards the use of the mainstream language of the father in thepublic domain and the language of the mother in the intimate domains. Thistype of domain specialisation is labelled by Blommaert et al. (2005a) as‘truncated multilingualism’, which allows for a large degree of communicationacross language boundaries in multilingual societies.

Truncated multilingualism is defined as ‘linguistic competencies which areorganized topically, on the basis of domains or specific activities’ (Blommaertet al., 2005a). This does not mean that all people are fully competent in all thedifferent languages they use. Instead, their linguistic competencies may varygreatly across different domains. For example, a teenager may have picked up


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urban slang in one language from his peers, but be unable to interact in thatlanguage when talking to an older family member. Truncated multilingualismis also influenced by a range of factors, such as language attitudes, levels ofliteracy, access to quality education, social class, level of income and especiallylocation. For the participants in this study the marginalisation which resultsfrom living in a poor, working class township will definitely influence theirchoice of language, language variety and register. They will want to indicatetheir social class and solidarity with speakers of the same languages orlanguage varieties in the township, and signal their particular ethnolinguisticidentity if the need arises. In this way, the township becomes both an‘enabling’ and ‘disabling’ force (Blommaert et al., 2005a) in people’s languagechoices. While it may disable people to use standard forms of languagessuccessfully, it nonetheless ensures the continued vitality of non-standardvarieties in this environment.

In the first two years of our research project in Wesbank, my researchassistants and I found a great deal of consistency in the high school pupils’written answers to questions on the languages they rated as most important inthe areas of education and employment (Dyers, 2004). In particular, theperception of the role of English as the trajectory out of the township, out ofpoverty and towards employment and a better life was fairly unassailable.English is seen by black South Africans as a guarantee of upwards socialmobility and as the key to good employment, in a country with 40%unemployment. It is highly unlikely that such entrenched attitudes willchange, despite the fact that obtaining a quality education in English is at thisstage an unattainable dream for the majority of the population.

In the third year of our research project, we decided to turn our attention tolanguage use in the intimate domains of our high school respondents. Wewanted to test the common assumption or language ideology (Collins &Slembrouck, 2005: 192), that only one or two languages would be used in theenvironment of the home, in interactions with friends and relatives and evenin intrapersonal communication. We anticipated mainly Afrikaans and someEnglish in Coloured homes, and Xhosa and some English in Xhosa homes.English is a compulsory school subject for all South Africans, and we weretherefore justified in making the assumption that it might also be used at thehomes of our target research population together with their mother tongues.Given the very real and sometimes politically engineered tensions amongthese two groups in the Western Cape (Dyers, 2004; Pluddeman et al., 2004),we assumed that we would find little or no use for Afrikaans in Xhosa homes,or for Xhosa in Coloured homes. In other words, we believed that the twogroups would be operating within their own distinct ‘frames’, which 40years of enforced separate development would have entrenched further. ForGoffman (1974, cited in Benford & Snow, 2000: 21), frames are ‘schemata ofinterpretation’ that enable individuals ‘to locate, perceive, identify and labeloccurrences within their life space and the world at large’. Frames help torender events or occurrences meaningful and thereby function to organiseexperience and guide action. How we construct our individual and socialidentities can therefore also be said to be a process of framing, in whichlanguage choice in different domains plays a vital part.


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Research MethodologyMy research assistants and I chose to work with high school pupils so that

we could track their patterns of language use, choice and attitudes from thestart to the end of their high school careers. Given that schools in peripheralcommunities frequently constitute a microcosm of the community itself, webelieved these young people would largely reflect the linguistic identities oftheir families. They were also likely to be more responsive to the rapid societalchanges in South Africa than older respondents. Their language use andattitudes were also likely to be useful indicators of sociolinguistic phenomenalike language shift, diglossia and codeswitching.

In the first two years of our research, we analysed their beliefs and attitudesabout the languages and speech communities to which they were exposed inWesbank, as well as the various domains in which they used particularlanguages (see Tables 1 and 2). This research led us to the discovery of a smallgroup of crosslinguistic, crosscultural families in Wesbank, the result ofintermarriage between Xhosas and Coloureds. A survey conducted at theschool in 2006 revealed that such families are a minority in Wesbank, with onlyapproximately 10% of the 1162 pupils attending Wesbank High indicating thatthey had parents from both population groups. Children from these familieswere included in this study, as it is our belief that they are part of a growinggroup of young, working class South Africans whose patterns of language useare strongly influenced by the increasingly multilingual and multiculturalenvironment in which they live.

In the third year of the research, the decision was taken to investigate whatlanguage choices were actually being made in the home and other intimatedomains of language use. Instead of working with large groups, we conductedindividual and focus group interviews with 12 Grade 10 pupils, six of whomspoke Afrikaans as their mother tongues, while a further five spoke Xhosa astheir mother tongues. One respondent spoke Sotho as his mother tongue. And,as was noted above, we deliberately included pupils whom we had identifiedas coming from crosslinguistic, crosscultural families. Table 3 provides us withinformation on all the respondents chosen for the study. The Afrikaans groupformed one focus group, while the Xhosa group (which included the Sothospeaker) formed the other one.

Two language teachers, one a teacher of Xhosa and one a teacher ofAfrikaans, assisted us with the selection of the pupils. In informal discussionsheld in the staff room, they also gave us their views on the pupils from thecrosslinguistic families. In their opinion, these pupils appeared to be at homeamong different languages, and more open and empowered as a result of theirmuch richer linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The Afrikaans teacher said:‘They are already there where we want to be’, thereby signalling her sense thatbeing multilingual and multicultural are important components of becoming‘ideal’ South Africans. The Xhosa teacher was of the opinion that if such youngpeople could become the norm rather than the exception, this could haveimportant implications for racial tolerance and harmony in areas of linguisticand cultural confluence such as Wesbank township.


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The 12 respondents for the study on which this paper is based were allGrade 10 pupils aged between 15 and 17. Six of them came from cross-linguistic, crosscultural families. With the exception of one migrant from thecity of Johannesburg, all of them had migrated to Wesbank from other parts ofthe Western Cape or from the rural districts of the Eastern Cape. The followingfactors formed part of the discussions and interviews:

Table 2 Language use in particular domains, Grade 8 and 9 Xhosa pupils (2004�05)

Domains of use(in percentages),n�90 (Gr. 8),n�34 (Gr. 9)

Xhosaonly

Englishonly

Englishand Xhosa

Xhosaand

Afrikaans

Xhosaand

Zulu/Sotho

English,Xhosa

andAfrikaans

Grades 8 9 8 9 8 9 8 9 8 9 8 9

Home 51 79 16 6 2 6 3 9 3 26

Church orMosque

47 56 4 3 6 24 1 9 3 18

School (in class) 3 100 3 62 3 29

School(playground)

8 18 78 7 41 9 2 32

Shopping 1 12 18 3 9 32 1 9 2 41

Streets ofWesbank

16 6 8 3 7 12 1 12 6 4 59

With friends 44 29 6 7 18 1 6 3 3 1 35

Table 1 Language use in particular domains, Grade 8 and 9 Afrikaans pupils (2004�05)

Domains of use,N�70 (2004),N�37 (2005)

Afrikaans only Englishonly

English andAfrikaans

English,Xhosa andAfrikaans

Grades 8 9 8 9 8 9 8 9

Home 80% 16% 0 0 14% 84% 3% 0

Church/Mosque 37% 41% 9% 5% 20% 54% 9% 0

School (in class) 100%a 5% 0 0 69%b 95%

School (playground) 80% 70% 0 0 17% 24% 3% 5%

Shopping (Bellvillearea)

80% 38% 6% 5% 6% 57% 3% 0

Streets of Wesbank 80% 68% 0 0 17% 32% 3% 0

With friends 88% 62% 0 0 9% 38% 3% 0


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. parental influence (closeness of relationships, choices imposed, employ-ment level);

. level of parental education (e.g. illiterate, literate and educated up toprimary/secondary/tertiary level);

. influence of, and relationships with, other members of family;

. peer group influence;

. influences of environment; and

. level of family income.

These factors helped us to determine the role of relationships, social class,levels of education and income, as well as the surrounding environment on thelanguage choices made by the respondents in their intimate domains. Theindividual and focus group interviews lasted one hour each.

In the interviews, the intimate domains were subdivided into the followingcategories:

. speaking to yourself (e.g. swearing, exclaiming, praying, thinking aloud),in order to determine what language was used spontaneously when alone;

. speaking to your closest relatives at home, in order to determine thedominant languages at home;

Table 3 The Grade 10 informants for this study (real names changed)

Name Age Gender Family background Mother tongue/s

John 15 Male Coloured family Afrikaans

Marvin 16 Male Coloured family, but motherhas Xhosa stepbrothers

Afrikaans

Enrico 15 Male Coloured mother, Xhosa father;initially raised byXhosa grandmother

Afrikaans

Anthea 15 Female Being raised by trilingualbrother; father Coloured,mother Xhosa

English, Xhosa andAfrikaans

Edith 15 Female Mother Coloured, father Xhosa(but had Coloured mother)

Afrikaans

Sophie 15 Female Father Xhosa, mother Coloured Afrikaans

Zeb 15 Male Xhosa parents Xhosa

Lunga 17 Male Xhosa parents Xhosa

Nonsisi 16 Female Xhosa parents Xhosa

Beauty 17 Female Xhosa parents English, Xhosa andAfrikaans

David 15 Male Xhosa parents Xhosa

Mpho 16 Male Father Sotho, mother Xhosa,Afrikaans-speaking cousins

Sotho, Afrikaans andXhosa


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. socialising outside the home, to determine the language/s most used ininformal settings; and

. language/s used at places of worship, a domain which straddles both theprivate and the public domains. The family of the respondent wouldmost likely attend a place of worship where they could use their mothertongue/s with ease (although this, it must be stated, is not always thecase).

What emerged from these interviews were individual narratives whichshowed how these pupils constructed their own sense of their linguisticresources within the context/space of their peripheral working class township.The interviewers gave them the opportunity to choose the language in whichthey wanted to be interviewed. Afrikaans-speaking pupils responded in thenon-standard dialectal variety of Afrikaans in which they clearly felt mostcomfortable, even though some of them believed that they were usingstandard Afrikaans, while the Xhosa and Sotho pupils used informal Xhosa.

While the size of the research population does not really allow forgeneralisations to emerge, the individual case studies yielded very interestingdata on language choice in intimate domains.

ResultsThe data derived from the first two years of the study revealed contrasting

results between pupils’ actual reported patterns of use (see Tables 1�3) andtheir attitudes towards the different languages. English was rarely used on itsown, except at school. A survey of the domains in which they used variouslanguages revealed that both Afrikaans and Xhosa Grade 8 (first year ofsecondary school) pupils used mainly their mother tongues or a mixture of themother tongue and some English in most domains. English was chiefly used atschool in interactions with teachers. Grade 9 Afrikaans pupils, however,reported much more codemixing across all domains between English andAfrikaans, while a significant number of Xhosa Grade 9 pupils reportedcodemixing between Xhosa, Afrikaans and English in their interactions withfriends and on the streets of Wesbank.

However, when asked to write about the relative importance of eachlanguage, the results showed that for both Afrikaans and Xhosa pupils,English, as an index of spatial�social mobility, had the highest instrumentalvalue, although loyalty to the individual mother-tongues still remained(Dyers, 2004, 2006). The data gave little evidence that these pupils regardedeach other’s respective mother tongues as having any great intrinsic value intheir lives. However, the minority Xhosa pupils appeared to be more inclinedtowards codeswitching between English, Xhosa and Afrikaans as the needarose. This may indicate that these pupils were aware of how limited theircommunication in the community would be if they simply spoke Xhosa at alltimes, given that Afrikaans is a majority language not only in Wesbank, butalso in the Western Cape.

While the quantitative results provided a useful overview of languagechoice in different domains, they failed to capture the complexity of


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individual pupils’ actual language use, especially in their intimate domains,as the rest of this section will reveal. An analysis of the case study ofSophie given in the introduction reveals that the dominant language of herintimate domains is Afrikaans � with her parents, her brother and most ofher friends and at the church attended by her family. English (occasionallymixed with Afrikaans) is used to communicate with her young sister, herboyfriend and her mother’s English-speaking relatives. Xhosa is used withher paternal grandmother, with whom she does not have a close relation-ship, as well as with Xhosa-speaking people on the streets of Wesbank.Sophie’s case study shows similarities to that of Beauty, one of the Xhosapupils in this study. In Beauty’s family, Xhosa dominates in the intimatedomains, but both Afrikaans and English are also present. Her father andyounger siblings appear to be quite proficient in Afrikaans, while her eldestbrother prefers to interact in both Xhosa and English. With her Colouredfriends on the streets of Wesbank, Beauty interacts mainly in English, mixedwith a little Afrikaans.

A breakdown of reported language use in the different intimate categoriesby all the respondents now follows. In the category ‘speaking to yourself’, theAfrikaans respondents all used mainly Afrikaans, but occasionally also usedEnglish and Xhosa. One respondent reported using only English swearwords,while another said his prayers in English. Apart from the solitary Sothospeaker, Xhosa dominated in the intrapersonal domain with the Xhosarespondents, and only one reported using Afrikaans swearwords whentalking to himself. In the category ‘speaking to your closest relatives athome’, only one Xhosa respondent reported the use of another language,Afrikaans, with her father. Two of the other Xhosa respondents reported thattheir parents did not allow them to use this language at home, probablybecause of the parents’ association of the language with a repressive past (seeMalan, 1996).

But among the Coloured respondents, the picture was far more multi-lingual. Despite the dominance of Afrikaans in most of their homes,codeswitching to the other languages also occurred, depending on the familymember being addressed. This pattern was particularly marked in thoserespondents from crosslinguistic, crosscultural families. For example, in thecase of Enrico, one of the boys interviewed, his mother would address herbrother and sister in Xhosa, but switch to Afrikaans when the children werepresent � a phenomenon Auer (1998: 7�8) would describe as ‘preference-related switching’. The mother may have taken the conscious decision to raisethe children in Afrikaans because of the environment in which the family nowfinds itself, where Afrikaans enjoys a much higher status than Xhosa. Thechoice of topic would also influence the pattern of codeswitching in the home.One of the female respondents, Edith, reported scolding her younger sister inAfrikaans, but gossiping in Xhosa with her brother about certain neighbours.Edith said that Xhosa functioned as a kind of ‘secret code’ between her andher brother. The examples described here support Boxer and Yamamoto’sfindings on the role of family influence and intervention in the maintenance ofmother tongues. They also provide further evidence of Blommaert et al.’s


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‘dialogic places’, which allow more than one language to be present in thesame domain.

Outside the home, English was relied upon as a lingua franca betweenspeakers of different languages. But new networks of friends and neighboursmeant more exposure to each other’s languages, resulting in Afrikaansspeakers who also spoke some Xhosa with their Xhosa friends and vice versa.Thus John, one of the Coloured boys, reported using a mixture of Afrikaansand Xhosa with his friends. In places of worship, English was frequently usedto accommodate speakers of other languages. The Afrikaans respondentsattended churches where their mother tongue predominated, as did the Xhosarespondents. But in some of these churches, hymns were sung in otherlanguages as well as in the dominant language.

The overall pattern to emerge from this study was of either Afrikaans-dominant or Xhosa-dominant families, which could also use the other twomain languages of the township with varying degrees of proficiency in theirintimate domains. We also note that in the case of both Sophie and Beauty,their choice of language was dictated by the different role relationships withintheir intimate domains � e.g. in Sophie’s case, Afrikaans was used with herparents, English with her younger sister and Xhosa with her paternalgrandmother. Yet at the same time these role relationships also allowedroom for the use of other languages. As can be seen from the following excerptof the interview with Sophie, her young sister (being raised in English) wasalso exposed to Afrikaans and Xhosa in her intimate domains:

. . . um-um . . . sy’t Afrikaans . . . innie begin het sy Engels gepraat, entoe praat ons met haar Afrikaans sodat sy altwee die tale kan . . . leeroppie oomblik leer sy van my niggie nou Xhosa.

uhm . . . she (got?) Afrikaans . . . in the beginning she spoke English, andthen we spoke Afrikaans to her so that she could learn bothlanguages . . . at the moment she is learning Xhosa from my cousin.

Two of the male respondents used Afrikaans (or rather their particular varietyof Afrikaans) as an important marker of their individual identities. Most of theColoured respondents claimed that they could express their strongestemotions in Afrikaans. One of the boys described himself as an ‘AfrikaanseKaapenaar’ (an Afrikaans Capetonian), to distinguish himself from hisEnglish-speaking cousins. Another took pride in his ‘pure’ Afrikaans: ‘Ekprobeer Afrikaans skoon praat’ (I try to speak pure Afrikaans). Despite the factthat he used non-standard Afrikaans during the interview, he appeared tobelieve that he was speaking standard Afrikaans.

It is important to note that these respondents clearly saw a hierarchy interms of the varieties of Afrikaans and Xhosa that they could use. Thisdiglossia affected their attitudes towards these different varieties. Thelanguage they learned at school was the formal, standardised ‘high’ varietyseldom used in other domains. Virtually all the Xhosa respondents inter-viewed complained that the Xhosa they learned at school was ‘too difficult’, aview shared by some of the Afrikaans respondents about the Afrikaans theylearned at school. As one of the Afrikaans respondents, Anthea, put it:


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Die Afrikaanse juffrou ve’dydelik nie soe lekker soesie Engelse een nie.Die ve’dydelikings in Engels is makliker. Die meneer maak dit makliker.Ek hou meer van Engels as vak as Afrikaans eerste taal. Die juffrou praatmos soes in sywer Afrikaans � soes Sewende Laan se mense praat, soe.Os praatie yntlik regte Afrikaans nie, Ons praat Kaapse Afrikaans,Engels en Afrikaans deurmekaar.

The Afrikaans teacher doesn’t explain as nicely as the English one does.The explanations in English are easier. The (male) teacher makes it easier.I like English as a subject better than Afrikaans First Language. The(female) teacher talks pure Afrikaans � just like the people speak in‘Sewende Laan’ (a popular local soap opera). We don’t actually speakproper Afrikaans. We speak Cape Afrikaans, a mixture of English andAfrikaans.

The differences between the informal and formal variety of Afrikaans occurmainly in the lexical and phonological features, but not at the syntactical level.The main feature of non-standard Afrikaans is the frequent, often unmarkedcodeswitching that is typical of Cape Afrikaans, (McCormick, 2000) theinformal variety of Afrikaans most used in the township. Although even itsown speakers acknowledge the low status of this variety, it is clear from theabove interview extract that there is still considerable negativity aboutstandard Afrikaans among these pupils. They may have inculcated theattitudes of their parents, who grew up in the period of separate development,when standard Afrikaans was associated with a repressive and racistgovernment (see Malan, 1996). Here is another example of codeswitchingfrom one interview:

Well . . . met my ma is ek meer relaxing, like ek en my ma praat, ek sal myma alles vertel.

Well . . . I’m more relaxed with my mother. For example, when mymother and I chat, I will tell her everything.

Here we see the speaker using the English conjunction ‘well’ (she also usesthe English pronunciation for this word) to start the sentence instead of theAfrikaans ‘wel’, the adverb ‘relaxing’ instead of the Afrikaans ‘ontspanne’,and the conjunction ‘like’ instead of the Afrikaans ‘byvoorbeeld’. And this isdone in such an unmarked and spontaneous fashion that the speakerappears to be using a single language system instead of two (Hendricks,1996).

The presence of English in the intimate domains of the respondents in thisstudy had not led to the overtaking or devaluation of the mother tongues. Inthis township, English was mainly spread through education. However, theinequality of access to good education in South Africa leads to townshippupils frequently having to make do with a much poorer quality of instructionin the language, which is further hampered by low literacy levels at home. Itwas common to hear expressions of frustration with the language and itsassociation with academic failure at school. Respondents would say, forexample,


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Ek voelie vi’Engels praatie. (I don’t feel like talking English)

Ek sukkel ma’ mettie Engels. (I struggle with English)

Various researchers have pointed out the poor quality of language teaching,particularly English language teaching, in poor and working class areas ofSouth Africa (Alexander, 2000; Heugh, 2000). This is leading increasingly to asituation where those who are better off economically can afford to send theirchildren to better-resourced and well staffed English-medium schools, wherethey will acquire a good command of the language. This in turn will allowthem to benefit fully from its dominant position in domains like tertiaryeducation and the business sector. The rest of the population must get by asbest as they can with an inadequate command of the language, and thissituation helps to increase the huge inequalities in post-democratic SouthAfrica.

As in other countries, a more sophisticated use of English is increasinglybecoming a marker of belonging to a better social class in South Africa. Thestudy showed that some of the respondents regarded English as playing a partin creating social distance between members of the same family. They felt thatpeople who were better off largely spoke English, and did not live in thetownship. One respondent felt that English was largely for use with outsiders,adding:

My pa se suster se kinders praat Engels. Hulle is daai ‘hoe mense’. Hullekom nie vir ons kuier nie. Ons het mossie die geld nie. Hulle sallie eerskom kyk hoe dit gannie.

My father’s sister’s children speak English. They are those ‘high’ people.They don’t visit us, because we don’t have money. They won’t evencome to see how we are.

The association of English with a better life outside the township may explainwhy Sophie’s family decided ‘to raise the youngest member of the family inEnglish’. This respondent’s family is not unique in making the choice ofeducating the younger children in English, because of the very strong belief inespecially the Coloured community of the privileges that come with anEnglish-medium education. Researchers have shown that this is a commonpractice especially among Coloured families, but increasingly also amongother ethnic groups in South Africa (Anthonissen & George, 2003; Malan, 1996;Pluddemann et al., 2004).

ConclusionsAt the beginning of this paper, the question was asked whether teenagers in

one South African township were experiencing truncated multilingualism or alanguage shift towards English, the dominant language of power in thecountry. In order to answer the question, language use in intimate domainswas investigated in order to see whether such domains supported languagemaintenance and spread. Not only did we find that our respondents’ mothertongues were strongly maintained in these domains, but also that these


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‘dialogic spaces’ allowed for the use of other languages. The use of otherlanguages in these domains appeared to be influenced by the respondents’relationships with various members of the family or circle of friends. We alsofound that the languages used in the intimate domains continued to be spreadto younger members of the family or through the peer groups with whom therespondents interacted.

The evidence presented here may indicate that Wesbank is a site oftruncated multilingualism, despite the presence of a powerful language ofwider communication, English. Three enabling factors appear to influencethe continued vitality of the other languages � the space in which the peoplefind themselves, emotional identification with particular mother tongues andthe need for new social networks. Firstly, this is a poor, working classcommunity on the periphery of Cape Town, living in relative isolation fromthe more prosperous parts of the city, where there is a strong shift to Englishas the common language in many domains. Secondly, many respondentsreveal a close emotional identification with particular mother tongues likeAfrikaans and Xhosa which may have resulted from recent migration fromareas where these mother tongues predominate. Thirdly, as the population ismade up of migrants from different areas, new social networks had to becreated and people had to learn to cope very quickly with the languagesused within these networks. The young, who meet in spaces like the schoolclassroom, playgrounds, the streets of Wesbank and each others’ homes,appear to have adapted to their new multilingual and multiculturalenvironment with relative ease, and many are proud of their ability tointeract in other languages.

We believe that this community reflects, to a large extent, ‘the discourse ofcultural becoming, social mutations, and recombinant identities’, whichJacquemet (2005: 274) argues will allow us to begin to understand how newand evolving communities are learning to communicate in the late�modernage.

Acknowledgements

The Wesbank research was made possible with the financial assistance ofthe Culture, Language and Identity Project in the faculty of Arts at theUniversity of the Western Cape. I would also like to acknowledge the valuableassistance of the principal, teachers and pupils of Wesbank High School.

Correspondence

Any correspondence should be directed to Dr Charlyn Dyers, Departmentof Linguistics, University of the Western Cape, Private Bag X17, Bellville 7535,South Africa ([email protected]).

Notes1. In 1994, the first democratically elected government came to power in South Africa

after 300 years of colonial rule and 40 years of separate development dominated byWhite South Africans.

2. For the purpose of this paper, I shall use the racial categories of pre-democracySouth Africa, as these categories continue to be used by the current dispensation.


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These categories are: Black to refer to indigenous South Africans, White to refer tothose of European descent, Coloured to refer to those of mixed descent, and Indian,to refer to those descended from the Indian subcontinent.

3. South Africa has 11 official languages: English (8.2%), Afrikaans (13.3%), Xhosa(17.6%), Zulu (23.8%), Ndebele (3%), Swati (2%), South Sotho (7.9%), Pedi or NorthSotho (9.4%), Tswana (8.2%), Venda (2%) and Tsonga (3%). The figures in bracketsreveal the percentages of mother-tongue speakers of each language according tothe 2001 Census.

4. The South African Group Areas Act of 1950 forced people of different ethnic originto live in areas demarcated for their specific group. The best areas were reservedfor White occupants, with other groups being restricted to peripheral areas. Evenin these peripheral areas, a strict hierarchy was maintained, with better areas beingzoned for those classified Coloured and Indian and the worst areas going to thoseclassified Black. It was not uncommon for people to attempt to get reclassified inorder to access a better quality of life.

5. Wesbank High, where our research took place, is a dual medium (Afrikaans andEnglish) school, which also offers Xhosa as a First Language from Grade 8. MostXhosa pupils choose to learn Xhosa as First Language and English as SecondLanguage, but a small minority choose English as First Language and Afrikaans asSecond Language. This means that pupils are either placed in the English-mediumclasses or in the Afrikaans-medium classes, but staff shortages have meant thatteachers frequently have to teach both groups in one class. The Xhosa students arenormally placed in the English-medium classes for subjects like Geography andScience.

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Documents

Truncated Multilingualism or Language Shift? An Examination of Language Use in Intimate Domains in a New Non-racial Working Class Township in South Africa