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Abstract
Codeswitching by African language speakers in South Africa (whether speaking English or the first language) has been extensively commented on and researched. Many studies analyse the historical, political and sociolinguistic factors behind this growing phenomenon, but there appears to be a little urgency about establishing a database of new lexicons to inform first-language interventions in education and public information programmes. In this article I use research conducted in three townships in Cape Town to focus on one aspect of codeswitching, namely lexical borrowing, in one of South Africa's languages, Xhosa. The central argument tested in this article is that lexical borrowing in Xhosa is driven by a need to simplify expression by using syllabically shorter English words. I test this hypothesis by (a) establishing the average syllabic difference between Xhosa and English; (b) seeking lexical responses to a set of pictures; (c) analysing lexical borrowing in the main Xhosa radio station. In addition, the article uses the data collected to elucidate the link between the Xhosa speakers’ lexicon and the concepts it needs to describe, and then suggests further possible reasons for the choice of English over Xhosa.
Notes
1. The Minister of Higher Education, Blade Nzimande, said in September 2009 that ‘those taking up African languages at university level were sometimes perceived by their peers as “second-grade students”’ (Sapa, 2009).
2. The most watched news bulletin on South African television is a Zulu daily newscast, attracting an audience of 3.2 million, followed by a Xhosa bulletin with 2.7 million watchers (Naidu, 2010).
4. An example of this fixation on standard Xhosa was the debate in 2009 on the official Xhosa name for Cape Town's new stadium. Councillors were unanimous yesterday in their support of Cape Town Stadium as the name for the new facility being built for the World Cup, but there was some confusion about its Xhosa equivalent. Ikapa Stadium was first suggested, but then it was said that eStadium saseKapa would be more accurate. City director of legal services Lungelo Mbandazayo ended the debate by calling for the stadium to be Inkundla yezemidlalo Yasekapa (Lewis, 2009).
In the present study, not one respondent offered inkundla yezemidlalo when shown a picture of a stadium. When the word inkundla was put to them informally, all respondents said the word meant ‘law court’.
5. In a recent study on health support, a Xhosa-speaking respondent (in a recorded interview transcribed by the author of this article) struggled to understand the standard Xhosa word for ‘support’, inkxaso, used by the interviewer, and asked, ‘Yintoni inkxaso?’ (What is inkxaso?) The interviewer replied, ‘Inkxaso yi-support.’ (Inkxaso is ‘support’.) For the remainder of the Xhosa conversation, both interviewer and interviewee used the English word ‘support’.
6. Simon Donnelly observed in a letter to the Mail & Guardian newspaper that with regard to language, the official government census could not be deemed reliable. South Africa appears to be neatly chopped up into 11 zones of monolingual speakers. The truth is radically removed from this. First, there are documentable, important subvarieties of several national languages: there are children (importantly, for the purposes of language transmission) speaking Mpondo, Bhaca, Cele and smaller Nguni languages, who are forced to declare themselves arbitrarily as ‘Xhosa’ or ‘Zulu’, even where these ‘dialects’ are mutually unintelligible with the standard language.
Second, there are millions of households that are multilingual in English and Afrikaans, or in some combination of Zulu/Xhosa/Sotho/Tsonga/everything else, for whom it is a non-trivial matter to decide whether they feel they speak more Zulu or more Tsonga, more English or more Afrikaans, at home.
When asked by a form-wielding official, guess what? People usually answer with the name of a prestige language, such as Zulu or English (as cited in Hacksley, Jeffery, Mesthrie, Reddy, & Wildsmith-Cromarty, n.d.).
7. In 2009 I conducted an analysis of the Xhosa used in the Department of Education Annual National Assessment for Grades 1 to 7 (Craig, 2009, p. 31). I observed:
In the Grade 1 NUMERACY section, Question 6: Writing the numeral 12 in words. This proved very difficult for learners. This is probably because most Xhosa speaking people count in English words. Of a random selection of 10 answer books only two learners could transcribe the numeral correctly in Xhosa:
| • | 1 learner wrote lishumi anesibini | ||||
| • | 1 learner wrote lishum elwesibini | ||||
| • | 1 learner wrote iyishumuiyi | ||||
| • | 1 learner wrote lishumi elinebini | ||||
| • | 1 learner wrote 60 | ||||
| • | 1 learner wrote shumile sibini | ||||
| • | 1 learner wrote lismztkanawi | ||||
| • | 1 learner wrote litsumi lesibini | ||||
| ✓ | 2 learners wrote lishumi elinesibini [the correct term in standard Xhosa] | ||||
8. A good example of this would be an exchange recounted to me by a person teaching Afrikaans to Xhosa speakers, who overheard a learner asking his friend in class: ‘Lithini igama elithi “snaaks” nge-Afrikaans?’ (What is the word for snaaks in Afrikaans?) Clearly the Xhosa speaker had so internalised the lexical item snaaks that he did not realise it was, in fact, a ‘borrowed’ Afrikaans term (meaning ‘funny’ or ‘strange’) and saw it as a ‘normal’ Xhosa word.
9. Ninety-four per cent of Masiphumelele residents earn less than R1 700 per month (about US$219). http://www.capetown.gov.za/en/stats/2001census/Documents/Masiphumelele.htm
10. Cape Town has an annual influx of 48,000 people, many of them from the Eastern Cape. Source: http://www.waterdialogues.org/south-africa/documents/p.46CapeTownCaseStudySummary.pdf].
11. The population of Masiphumelele nearly doubled in the five years from 1996 to 2001 and has more than tripled since then. http://www.capetown.gov.za/en/stats/2001census/Documents/Masiphumelele.htm
12. Many thanks to Sara Muller, BSc, for statistical calculations using ANOVA.
13. One of UMhlobo Wenene's taglines is isiXhosa asitolikwa ‘Xhosa is not translated’.
23. In Xhosa, words functioning similarly to adjectives in English are divided into two groups: adjectives and relatives. The adjectives are a fixed set, comprising the numbers 1–6; the Xhosa equivalents of ‘big’, ‘small’, ‘tall’, ‘short’, ‘lovely’, ‘ugly’, ‘old’, ‘new’ and ‘many’; and the question ‘how many?’. Any other word that describes a noun is called a relative and uses different prefixes from the adjectives. There are underived relative stems such as ‘easy’, ‘difficult’ and all the colours, but many are derived from other parts of speech.