Elsevier

Lingua

Volume 251, February 2021, 103027
Lingua

Language, race or place? Influential factors in determining young “Coloured” individuals’ attitudes towards Afrikaans accents in English

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.103027Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Young “Coloureds” present an overall positive bias towards their own ethnic variety.

  • L1, language range and community language practices can predict language biases.

  • Social distance with the White group and place of residence may affect biases.

  • The Implicit Association Test can be an effective tool for sociolinguistic research.

Abstract

In South Africa, current social dynamics are still largely determined by the heavy legacy of apartheid. In this context, the term “Coloured” is widely used to delineate a social group that is generally not considered white or black in the old senses. This study focuses on the implicit language attitudes of 84 young Coloured English and Afrikaans speaking participants towards Cape Flats English, largely associated with Coloured communities of the greater Cape Town area, and Afrikaner English, largely associated with the White group. Implicit Association Test results show an overall statistically significant implicit positive bias towards Cape Flats English among participants, although a small subgroup reversed this tendency. A post-IAT survey was used to investigate the contribution of a number of social variables in determining the biases associated with each accent. A regression analysis detected that participants’ L1, language repertoire and other community language practices play a significant role in predicting such language biases. Furthermore, a correlation analysis also showed a trend regarding both the language distribution in their place of residence and social distance levels with the White group. Finally, a qualitative analysis based on the comparison of context-relevant cases underlined the complex in-group dynamics of the studied sample.

Introduction

In today's South Africa, issues of language, race and space often lead to social friction as a result of the heavy legacy of apartheid. That is, although apartheid officially ended in 1994, the profound effects are still shaping the social dynamics of the country to a large degree.

With regard to language, despite the fact that the South African Constitution grants official status to 11 official languages, the advanced language policies meant to redress and develop historically marginalized African languages (The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, section 6) have barely been implemented. Unlike English or Afrikaans, indigenous African (Bantu) languages do not come into their own in terms of use as mediums of instruction nor do they have a relevant role in the economic or institutional activity of the country. To illustrate the overall impact of this problem, one might consider how the lack of top-down strategies to guarantee a more (linguistically) inclusive and legitimate access to education leads the majority of South African students to enter the primary, secondary and tertiary education system in no other home-language than English (Revised Language Policy for Higher Education, 2017). In fact, only English, and to a lesser extent, Afrikaans – as formerly (white) colonizing languages – currently hold a high status in South Africa (Dube, 2017). With this in mind, it then becomes clear that language issues are not entirely unrelated to racial or ethnic differences – another key aspect that remains entrenched in South African society.

Racial issues in South Africa are strongly rooted in the colonization period and, more significantly, in the era of apartheid. During apartheid, legislation became an imperative tool in the systematic categorization and segregation of the population by race, which enabled white people to maintain their superior status, privilege, and power. This often involved the relocation of Coloured, Black and Indian populations to create designated white suburbs (Trotter, 2009). While there have been significant advancements in human rights and social justice since the arrival of the democracy in 1994, interracial tensions are still often reported in today's South Africa. Relevant to the contextualization of this study, in a country where Black South Africans constitute the largest racial group (79.2%), followed by Coloureds (8.9%), Whites (8.9%) and Indian South Africans (2.5%) (Census, 2011), the paucity in the restitution and redistribution of land continues to perpetuate racial inequalities – shaping the lives of many South Africans (Ngcukaitobi and Eliseeva, 2019).

As we can infer, the notion of space also has its own complex local meanings in South Africa. As mentioned above, the country has experienced a long history of forcible removals of people as a result of racist legislation, especially under the Group Areas Act (Group Areas Act of 1950, 2019). Consequently, the relationship between people and space takes on a historical dimension with deep social implications. During apartheid, the majority of the non-white citizens had limited rights to access quality public spaces (including city centres), while townships or informal settlements multiplied throughout the country to cluster around the white dominated centres and suburbs (Public spaces, n.d.). As cities developed, millions of South Africans were also forcibly moved, sometimes more than once, “in order to create segregated living and working conditions in which one ethnicity was favoured at the expense of others” (Forced removals in South Africa, 2016). This structural inequality has caused animosity and division between the different racial groups, and it continues to shape and determine mobility, landscape and intergroup relations in South Africa today. In the words of Christopher (2002, p. 406), residential areas “remain essentially segregated according to the designs of previous governments” and, very often, “individuals retain the former legal system as the basis of group identity and policies of redress in the post-apartheid era”. In fact, although the presence of a large number of new migrants from other parts of Africa has contributed to change the rigidities in all but the most elite areas, patterns of segregation and self-segregation in today's South Africa are not uncommon (Vincent, 2008, Erasmus, 2010).

This general overview is not exhaustive but seeks to illustrate how the notions of language, race and place are historically and socio-culturally shaped in this country. Although they affect all racial groups in the country to a different extent, this study will focus on the so-called Coloured group. As such, it is important to note that the use of ethnic and racial labels in post-apartheid South Africa, including the term Coloured, continues to be very controversial. While some reject the label as part of the legacy of the apartheid era, others proudly defend it as an inalienable feature of their identity (Adhikari, 2009). In academia and institutional levels, this term has been widely used for a number of reasons, such as to keep track of the social demographics in the country (see Christopher, 2002, Census, 2011). Generally, the label Coloured refers to people partly descended from European settlers, but largely from Cape slaves, the indigenous Khoisan population, and other people of African and Asian (mostly Malay)1 origin who had been assimilated into Cape colonial society by the late 19th century (Adhikari, 2005a; see also Adhikari, 2009, p. xviii; Thutloa and Huddlestone, 2011, Álvarez-Mosquera, 2019). As Adhikari (2005a, p. 1) points out, Coloureds are commonly regarded as being of mixed race and “have held an intermediate status in the South African racial hierarchy, distinct from the historically dominant White minority and the numerically preponderant African population.” Their specific situation in the racial spectrum of South Africa often places them in a complicated social space. That is, despite their different phenotypes, religious affiliations and historical backgrounds, this minority group has been experiencing different degrees of marginalization since before and after apartheid (Morse and Peele, 1974, Adhikari, 2005b).

In addition to the racial dimension, the space and distribution of this group in the country presents profound socio-historical implications as well. Cape Town has the largest concentration of the Coloured population in South Africa and this fact is intrinsically related to the diverse origins of this city ever since its foundation by the Dutch East Indian Company in the seventeenth century. Relevant to this study, the lack of any formal schooling in Dutch for the natives and slaves, in combination with overall multilingualism, led to the development and widespread usage of Cape Dutch or non-standard Dutch (with different branches) which was later standardized as Afrikaans. This process of standardization played a crucial role in the emergence and formation of the (white) Afrikaner identity (Beukes, 2007), but it excluded the non-standard forms of Afrikaans (as the varieties spoken by Coloured people). These other varieties were dismissed as substandard and impure regardless of the fact that Coloureds were the majority of Afrikaans speakers (Giliomee, 2004). In more recent times, the coexistence of this diverse population has continued to present important social implications for the city dwellers. From historical removals such as the iconic District Six, an inner-city residential area with over 60,000 inhabitants (mostly Coloureds) in the 1970s, to the current migration movements from the Eastern Cape and other national and international destinations, Cape Town's racial and linguistic distribution is continuously evolving (Daniel, 2018, Rule, 2018). The 2011 census reflects that the number of Coloured people in Cape Town fell from 48.1% in 2001 to 42.4% in 2011, the White population dropped from 18.8% to 15.7%, while the Black population increased from 31.7% to 38.6%, and the Indian population remained around 1.4%. In line with the history of this country, these groups are not homogenously distributed and little racial desegregation across the city is largely the norm (Census, 2011).

Coloured communities’ linguistic profiles are of central importance to this research study. The language practices of the members of this group have also received academic attention in recent decades. McCormick (2002a, p. 221), who conducted research on the above-mentioned District Six, affirmed that the vast majority of English and Afrikaans speakers living there by the 1950s were not White, that is, they did not fall into the categories usually denoted by the terms ‘the Afrikaners’ and ‘the English.’ In fact, their mixed ancestry and perceived lack of linguistic purity excluded them from the rights and privileges enjoyed by the ‘pure’ White English and Afrikaans citizens. Notably, drawing on their language practices, McCormick used the term ‘vernacular’ to refer to all non-standard local usages of the mixed code (Afrikaans and English) spoken in this community as, of course, not everyone had an equal command of the two languages. Furthermore, she described this vernacular variety as a continuum between the two standards and defended its identity implications due to its symbolic and solidarity value, keeping both “pure English” and “suiwer [pure] Afrikaans” out of any informal interaction (McCormick, 2002b, p. 123; Álvarez-Mosquera, 2019).

Delving deeper into the linguistic side of this group, despite being often considered as Black South Africans, most Coloureds (and also Indians) do not have Bantu languages as their L1. As we have seen, due to the complex colonial engineering, most Coloureds (75.8%) have Afrikaans as their L1, followed by English (20.8%) (Census, 2011). Having said that, Coloured English (also known as Cape Flats English) and Coloured Afrikaans (also known as Kaapse Afrikaans (Kaaps) or Cape Vernacular Afrikaans), present their own characteristics. More specifically, in the context of Cape Town, it is important to keep in mind that Kaapse Afrikaans has distinct lexical, phonological, syntactic and morphological features (Dyers, 2015; see also Blignaut and Lesch, 2015, Hendricks, 2017) that set this variety apart from the Standard Afrikaans which is mostly spoken by Whites. Similarly, Cape Flats English (Finn, 2008) is also related but different from Afrikaner English2 (Álvarez-Mosquera, 2019).

Finally, despite the growing number of studies on language attitudes in South Africa, research across the major ethnic/racial groups as well as specific studies within Coloured communities are relatively few (Painter and Dixon, 2013, Álvarez-Mosquera and Marín-Gutiérrez, 2018). In one of the earliest studies, Webb (1992) investigated how Kaapse Afrikaans and Standard Afrikaans were perceived by Coloured pupils who had to learn the standard variety at school. His research shows that students struggled with Standard Afrikaans as it differed from their home language and underlines the negative connotations associated with the latter. Within the new (democratic) and multilingual South Africa, a number of scholars continue to investigate Coloured communities’ language attitudes towards both English and Afrikaans relying prominently on the use of questionnaires as the main method of data collection. Most research outputs from the last two decades suggest that English is increasingly becoming the preferred language in previously Afrikaans-dominated domains among both middle and working class (Neethling, 1998). This favourable attitude towards English is often reflected in the fact that a large number of Afrikaans-speaking parents from various socioeconomic groups are sending their children to English schools (Slabbert, 2000). In this vein, McCormick (2002b) describes an apparent split between Coloured speakers in their twenties, who were equally fluent in English and Afrikaans, and those over 30 who were predominately Afrikaans speaking. In her research, she detects a growing tendency among Coloured communities to raise children in English in traditional Afrikaans speaking families, although the latter was still widely used in the household with older relatives (McCormick, 2002b; see also Anthonissen, 2009). In this regard, she also suggests that most of the distinctive features of this L2 variety of English could fade away as a result of more formal English-medium education among the new generations (McCormick, 2002a, p. 223). From a sociolinguistic viewpoint, it is also important to note that, along with a progressive loss of status as a language of power in the New South Africa, McCormick (2002b, p. 96, pp. 102–103) observes that Coloured speakers tended to disassociate themselves from (Standard) Afrikaans by using their vernacular variety as well as a great degree of code-switching between English and Afrikaans (see also Neethling, 1998, Álvarez-Mosquera, 2019).

Based on this mounting evidence, scholars often refer to a growing shift from Afrikaans first language to English first language in many Coloured communities (Anthonissen, 2009, Farmer and Anthonissen, 2010, Beukes, 2015). However, other authors have questioned or nuanced the scope of this phenomenon. Dyers (2007) investigated the role of Afrikaans in indexing the individual and collective self among “‘Coloured’ school children marginalized by poverty, location and race” (p. 83) in Cape Town. Her study reveals that Kaapse Afrikaans still represents a significant part of their identity on both levels, despite the prominence of English in domains of power and education (see also Dyers, 2008). In line with her study, Thutloa and Huddlestone (2011) focused on patterns of language shift/maintenance in two semi-urban Western Cape Coloured communities. Their data indicate that, despite an increased use of English in the public domains such as church and workplace, Afrikaans also remains as strong marker of identity in these communities. More recently, Cooper (2018) focused on ideologies surrounding the use of language for classroom communication and the medium for knowledge transfer in the Cape Flats by means of a multisite ethnographic approach. His study shows that ideologies were perpetuated in terms of Kaapse Afrikaans speaking students depicting their variety as “low, deficient and slang” and perceiving Standard Afrikaans as “pure, high, proper and real” (p. 30). However, this study also offers examples of how Kaapse Afrikaans can be seen as a way of vindicating their ‘colouredness’ and resisting the dominant linguistic ideologies (p. 42).

In light of the previous research, it can be argued that English has progressively gained more space and functions in many Coloured communities in line with its status of lingua franca and perception as a language of higher prestige. However, data also suggest that Afrikaans remains a dominant language in lower class communities and as an overall important identity marker in this group. In the words of Dyers (2007, p. 97), “people can continue to identify powerfully with their home languages, especially when it enhances their personal and group identities or is a marker of their ethnolinguistic distinctiveness.” Due their indexical nature, accents as well as languages, can act as a relevant index of micro-networks, in-group identity, and as a possible exclusion/inclusion mechanism (Silverstein, 2003; see also McCormick, 2002b, Paterson, 2008, Thutloa and Huddlestone, 2011).

Therefore, in South Africa today where the role of English as a powerful language of wider communication underlines the indexicality of accents, it seems fitting to investigate the implicit language attitudes of young Coloured English and Afrikaans speaking participants towards Cape Flats English (CFE), and Afrikaner English (AE), especially among educated (college) speakers. As there remains a paucity of evidence in this area, this study seeks to shed light on the factors that can determine this group's attitudes towards Afrikaans accents in English by taking an innovative socio-cognitive approach. To fulfil this goal, despite the official (higher) status of Standard Afrikaans and CFE's potential association with lower/less educated social sectors, we postulate that positive bias towards the CFE variety will persist among members of our target group (hypothesis 1). In addition, context-relevant sociolinguistic variables considered in this study (see Methodology) will contribute to explain the detected biases (hypothesis 2). From a sociolinguistic viewpoint, the current study represents a step beyond our previous research in which we focused on young Coloured implicit attitudes towards Standard South African English and Afrikaans accented-English (Álvarez-Mosquera, 2019) – by now factoring in attitudes towards two Afrikaans accented varieties. In addition, it also contributes to the overall understanding of language attitudes within this complex context, with potential theoretical and sociolinguistic implications (see conclusion).

Methodologically, this study also represents a step away from the predominant methods used to explore language attitudes within this group – mostly based on the direct elicitation of language attitudes. As will be detailed below, by means of a context-relevant version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and a post-IAT survey that investigates the interrelation between participants’ language biases and their sociolinguistic background, we also seek to establish a different methodological approach to advance the understanding of language attitudes in the South African context.

Section snippets

Methodology

Based on this specific linguistic, racial and socio-spatial background, the study of the implicit attitudes among young Coloured individuals towards CFE and AE can provide us with even more fine-grained information in regard to their current social dynamics in post-apartheid South Africa. To this aim, the language biases of 84 young (18–25 years old) self-identified members of this group were studied by means of the IAT (Greenwald et al., 1998). More precisely, we used an audio Implicit

Results

Before calculating the bias for each participant, raw data of the 84 subjects were first screened for fast guesses, inaccurate answers and reaction times under 200 ms or over 10 s (see Ratcliff, 1993, Greenwald et al., 1998, Greenwald et al., 2003, Greenwald et al., 2009), resulting in the removal of 1.83% of the data.

Cleaned data were analyzed according to Greenwald et al., 2003’s algorithm D. Standard deviation and mean reaction time values were calculated for both experimental and trial

Discussion

The first question in this study sought to determine if positive bias towards CFE, rather than towards AE, would persist among participants despite the official status (higher prestige) of Standard Afrikaans vs. CFE and their potential use/exposure to these varieties as educated/college speakers (hypothesis 1). As depicted in Fig. 1, Fig. 2, the analysis shows that participants presented a statistically significant positive bias towards CFE, with some relevant exceptions. More specifically, a

Conclusion

The purpose of this study was to investigate influential factors in determining young Coloured individuals’ attitudes towards Afrikaans accents in English. Language, race and place appear to play a role in the development of specific language attitudes and our innovative methodological approach provided relevant information in these three areas. First, IAT results demonstrated that there was an overall statistically significant implicit positive bias towards CFE, although a small subgroup

Acknowledgements

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial or non-for-profit sectors. We would like to acknowledge Prof. Rajend Mesthrie's research chair in Migration, Language and Social Change, via the National Research Foundation's South African Research Chairs Initiative (grant no. 64805) for hosting the corresponding author at the University of Cape Town.

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