Hy leer dit nie hier nie (‘He doesn't learn it here’): talking about children's swearing in extended families in multilingual South Africa

ABSTRACT

This paper explores family language policy as a conceptual framework for exploring the ideologies around swearing and children in a multilingual family environment. The case study revolves around two young male children born to adolescent mothers living in socio-economically marginalised neighbourhoods in Cape Town, South Africa. Whilst family language policy research has traditionally investigated children's language learning in multilingual family contexts, this paper focuses on practices and discourses around swearing. The children are raised in a particular type of family: their young parents do not live together, but with their respective extended families. Drawing on recordings of interactions and casual conversations, the paper shows that swearing is an important topic for adults within talk around children's language. General questions around family language policy uncover the participants’ association of children's use of Afrikaans with swearing. Moreover, the interpretation of empirical data brings to the fore the contradictions between language socialisation practices and expressed family language policies around children's acquisition of swearwords. Furthermore, the paper highlights how beliefs around children and swearing are not expressed within the nuclear family as a social unit, but rather along extended family lines – thereby emphasising the processes of ‘family making’.

KEYWORDS:

• Family language policy
• language socialisation
• swearing
• adolescent mothers
• Kaaps

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by The NRF (SARCHI) chair of Prof. R. Mesthrie (No. 64805, Migration, Language & Social Change). Opinions expressed in this paper are not to be attributed to the NRF.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Beers Fägersten (2012, p. 3) points out that several, often interchangeable, terms (for example, cursing, expletives, taboo, foul or rude language) are used by scholars. I employ the terms ‘swearing’ and the Afrikaans equivalent, vloek, as they are the emic terms used by the participants.

2. The names of the neighbourhoods and the participants are anonymised.

3. The adolescent parents reported that isiXhosa was part of their school curriculum at primary school level.

4. As a White Afrikaans-English multilingual, I also engage in fluid linguistic, however the varieties I speak are closer to (the ideologically constructed) Standard variety.

5. Moenie is a contraction of moet nie, and although used in both Kaaps and informal Standard Afrikaans, such contractions are characteristic of Kaaps.

6. Third person singular verbs do not necessarily require word-final -s in Cape Flats English (McCormick, 2002, p. 227).

7. Moer is a ‘protean term’ meaning ‘mother’ or ‘womb’ (Hughes, 2006, p. 444).

8. The affrication of [j] to [ʤ] in djy (‘you’) and other vocatives and pronouns such as jou (‘your’ singular) and julle (‘you’ plural) is a phonological feature of Kaaps (Hendricks, 2017, p. 9).