5.1 Lexical acquisition in isiXhosa-speaking toddlers
5.1.3 Linguistic and ontological considerations
5.1.3.5 Incompatibility across lexical items
The research that I conducted in monolingual homes and crèches in both rural and urban areas revealed vast differences between these social contexts and average English-speaking or bilingual isiXhosa- and English-speaking suburban families. The vocabulary items I contrast below are ones that appear in the UK English version of the MacArthur-Bates CDI. For those items that did remain on the first pilot list, cases of children producing these words were either extremely low or non-existent. To exemplify this idea, from our data set only one child in Mbolompo and two children in Xorha produce ifriji ‘fridge’ and not a single child produces ifriza ‘freezer’. Here, I itemise just some of the lexical differences, like ‘fridge’ and ‘freezer’, that arise from dissimilar social and environmental contexts.
Mommy, daddy, sister, brother
IsiXhosa-speaking children grow up knowing all adult females as umama ‘mother’ and all adult males as utata ‘father’. A similar generalised application occurs with usisi ‘sister’ and ubhuti ‘brother’ which are used for all members of the peer group. Thus the notion of a ‘family’ is extended and the child becomes acquainted with many more adults and children, all of whom are seen as kin. Some children in rural areas go to a crèche, but most stay at home and follow the caregiving adult around as she gets through her quotidian tasks of feeding animals, gardening, doing the laundry by hand in a large tub, and cleaning the home. In townships, more children attend crèches than in rural areas, although some small children are looked after by babysitters while the parents are at work. These babysitters are also referred to as umama, with no separate word being used for a nanny.
Upstairs, downstairs, basement, bedroom, bathroom, bathtub, toilet, garage, park
Township homes are much the same as their suburban counterparts, apart from often being much closer together, with far more interaction among families. Houses are invariably single-storeyed, so concepts of upstairs and downstairs and basements (as they occur in the MacArthur-Bates inventory) are unfamiliar. Bedrooms in rural areas often double up as kitchens and vice versa.
90 In both rural and urban areas there is a lack of household plumbing: quite often toilets are found outside, and water frequently has to be fetched from a river or communal tap. Bath time is not a time for play. If there is a car, it is kept in the yard, not in a garage. A ‘garage’ is a place where one gets petrol. In rural areas, there are no specifically demarcated play areas such as parks.
Rocking chair, high chair, oven, fridge, toy, toybox
In both urban townships and rural areas, it is rare to find different types of seating arrangements as they occur in the English CDI version. There are no rocking chairs or high chairs, although couches are fairly common among those who can afford an alternative to the beds, benches and upturned plastic buckets that most rural, and many township, inhabitants use for seating. Most homes, urban and rural, have hotplates for cooking, but not ovens. Sometimes old, non-functioning fridges serve as cupboards.
Toys and toyboxes are not common in either urban or rural areas.
Train, tractor, truck, helicopter, motorcycle, boat
While taxis (in the South African sense of minibuses plying fixed routes) and busses are an everyday part of township and rural environments, other forms of transport are less common: there are no trains or boats, for example, in mountainous rural villages, and even private cars and motorcycles are rare, being luxuries that few can afford. In these areas children use wheelbarrows to carry groceries from the (minibus) taxi after a trip to a town.
Lion, giraffe, tiger, penguin, crocodile
Children know the animals they actually encounter in their neighbourhoods, such as dogs, cats, goats, cows, chickens, and pigs. Because storybooks are rare, they seldom know the names of more exotic animals such as lions, giraffes, tigers, penguin,s and crocodiles, unless they appear in folktales, for example, UMvundla ‘Mr Hare’.
Park, picnic, zoo, circus, library, bike, trike, skateboard
Some townships in urban areas have parks, but this is not the case in rural areas. Children play outside and use whatever they can find as toys. Traditional healers sometimes allow children to play their drums, while at traditional ceremonies they dance and clap and take part in the general adult festivities. People in rural areas do not picnic, nor do they go to the zoo or circus. In urban areas some caregivers take their children to libraries, but books, especially in isiXhosa, are very scarce in rural
91 areas. There are few bikes, trikes, skateboards, or roller-skates to be seen in the streets of the rural areas as the roads are not tarred.
The tissue issue
An example of economic exposure affecting the understanding of a word is vividly illustrated by the confusion that was encountered around the word ‘tissue’. The isiXhosa translation of the original CDI list gave this as i-tissue, which was corroborated by middle-class and working-class isiXhosa-speaking caregivers living in urban areas. However, caregivers in the rural Eastern Cape, when presented with the same translation, needed us to explain the word to them: “What are the functions of a tissue?”
they asked. It was explained that it was to wipe noses or clean hands in the absence of a wet cloth.
Eventually the caregivers started laughing. “That’s toilet paper! Tissue? Tissue! My goodness!
Sometimes we can’t even afford toilet paper, and you expect us to have tissues!” In the Oxford English- Xhosa Dictionary (Fischer et al., 2010: 668), ‘tissue paper’ is glossed as iphepha eliyacuyacu ‘paper which is flimsy’. A woman in her sixties asked us if we were not possibly referring to itshefu
‘handkerchief’. None of the younger mothers had presented itshefu to us as a possible translation, which can be explained by the fact that the handkerchief (from which the word itshefu orginates) has largely died out as an everyday item today, even among English speakers.
The point I am trying to make here is that these speakers do not have the luxury of what they see as a particular sub-class of toilet paper, that is, a tissue. Even women who had travelled to cities and had bought fast food, speaking among themselves, said “Oh, they mean the serviettes you get with KFC [Kentucky Fried Chicken]!” At the day care centre in Masiphumelele referred to above, ‘tissue’ was translated as ifadukwe, literally ‘a dish cloth’. This example also points to the fact that certain lexical terms imply relative wealth and socio-economic privilege, and it is imperative to be aware of the role that exposure plays when adapting the CDI in line with the parameters I mention above.
In addition, it became apparent after the CDI data collection that iphepha, which traditionally refers to paper on which one writes or draws, is being used in addition to itoyileth-phepha as a lexical item for
‘toilet paper’, which again points to the role economic exposure can play. That is, for many rural (and urban) inhabitants buying paper on which to write or draw is a luxury. Hence the associated meaning of iphepha with that which is more common for them, namely ‘toilet paper’.
In South Africa, most monolingual isiXhosa-speaking children are raised in either rural or urban settings, or straddle both worlds, but neither context has much in common with the average middle-class
92 English-speaking home. In some small pockets, though, such as the crèche or school, there are similar preoccupations. For example, while many of the toddlers know very few nursery rhymes or songs, either in isiXhosa or English − apart from popular songs played on radio and TV to which they dance, mimicking the actions of the adult singers − a day care centre in Masiphumelele was encountered where songs and rhymes in both languages were deliberately taught. The centre also had English storybooks, which resulted in learners knowing isolated English terms, such as ‘penguin’, and ‘lion’: a caregiver would read the word out in English and point to the corresponding pictures.
Such pockets of exposure to other languages and cultures seldom exist for the English-speaking child.
If an English-speaking parent were to be asked whether their child knew what a kraal was, or a flat stone for grinding, or a spaza,62 or wet cow dung used for smearing floors, the response would probably be puzzlement and an insistence that such terms were far from commonplace and much too obscure for a small child to know. This demonstrates the problem: that the items occurring in an English- speaking child’s world are considered ‘standard’, while those in the isiXhosa-speaking child’s environment are perceived as out of the ordinary, and consequently seldom feature in children’s resources and are largely ignored when creating texts (see Alexander and Bloch, 2004: 12, regarding the ‘print-scarce’ environments of African languages).