Introduction
1. Theoretical foundations
1.3. The South African perspective
In any multilingual and multicultural country the interplay between language and ethnicity can function as a divisive mechanism and can be mobilised for political purposes and conflicts. In few countries, however, this interplay was corrupted to the same extent as was the case in South Africa. The fact that the term ethnolinguistic groups still finds little critical discussion in South Africa presupposes how inextricable the link between language and ethnic belonging has been pursued.
During apartheid, language and ethnic belonging were the two crucial factors employed in order to segregate people from one another. In fact, the concept of ethnicity was the underlying framework of many of the brutal laws of apartheid, which essentially outlawed inter-ethnic interaction (Kamwangamalu 2001a: 79).43 The entire society was divided into different ethnic groups according to two main
43 There was, for instance the Population Registration Act (1950), according to which the entire population was divided into distinct groups, the Immorality Amendment Act (1950), which outlawed interethnic sex or the Group Areas Act (1950), which determined separate residential areas for the various different ethnic groups (cf. Hahne 2002: 70).
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factors: skin colour and language (Kamwangamalu 2000c: 1). After physical appearance, language was thus politically the only legitimate factor in determining a person's ethnic groups. It is not surprising then, as various authors have noted, that in South Africa language serves as the crucial characteristic in ascribing people's ethnic identity (Malan and Walker 1995; Webb 1996; Kamwangamalu 2001a, b). The system of homelands or bantustans was based on the clear-cut ethnolinguistic distinction of the African people.
The relationship between language, culture and identity is therefore extremely stigmatised in the South African context. Herbert suggests a simplified equation in this context, which has been referred to quite extensively in South African sociolinguistics: language = culture = homeland (Herbert 1992: 4). The creation of the so-called bantustans separated the black people on the basis of their apparent language differences. As previously mentioned, these differences were more imagined than linguistically sound, as there exists mutual intelligibility between several varieties. Elsewhere it is described most aptly how ethnicity and race are principle classification criteria in the construction of 'imagined communities' (Anderson 1983).
Since the transition from apartheid to democracy in 1994, however, the state- imposed focus on the coterminous relationship between individuals and communities' languages and ethnicities has virtually dissolved. With the birth of democracy and the death of statutory apartheid, the former ethnic homelands have been reintegrated into South Africa (Kamwangamalu 2001a: 81) and, among other things, people are free to choose where to live. The government has further given official recognition to eleven languages, including English, Afrikaans and the nine African languages. Although the previously existing ethnolinguistic boundaries are now open for change and redefinition, the weight of history rests heavily on the South African society, as De Klerk (2002) shows in reference to the mother-tongue education stigma. Linguistic, cultural or ethnic criteria did and often still do coincide in the make-up of South African communities and the variables are often interchangeable. Due to the fact that language and ethnicity presented the main
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pillars of apartheid politics, the interrelationship between these two variables remains a controversial issue. Niedrig (1999: 255), for instance, notes that in post- apartheid South Africa there still exists the tendency to avoid using the term 'language' in relation to terms such as 'culture' or 'ethnic identity', as the correlation between these variables is associated with the philosophy of apartheid.
Similarly, Kotze (2000: 7) writes that "an understanding of the role that ethnicity in conjunction with language played in the shaping of South African society is often obfuscated by the stigmatisation of concepts as a result of the country's political history". The conceptualisation of language and ethnicity in South Africa is thus not neutral and must be considered an extremely sensitive and emotional issue. The rather recent focus issue of the InternationalJournal of the Sociology of Language entitled Language and Ethnicity in the New South Africa and edited by Kamwangamalu (2000a, b) presents a milestone of sociolinguistic research in the field.
Without a doubt, post-modern and post-structuralist scholars would criticise and oppose the static view of language and ethnicity that apartheid politics had cultivated. The dynamic, context-dependent, constructed and re-constructed nature of ethnic identities found no place during Apartheid. In fact, the rigid structure of the society during the Apartheid perpetuated the myth of language as a strictly bounded phenomenon and ethnic groups as culturally homogenous (Herbert 1992:
2). This view, however, has proven illusionary in a post-modern and post- structuralist sense, and several scholars (Auer 1998; Bhaba 1990; Edwards 1997;
Gal 1989; Gordon 1978; Heller 1988; 1992; 1995) have, in recent years, discussed the flexible, context-bound and negotiable nature of particular identities. In a similar vein, Filatova (1996: 13) argues that in the South African context:
Colonial society as a stage of social development through which all African countries, including South Africa, have gone has created a complicated system of intertwined identities, not only ethnic but also social, political, gender, cultural, linguistic etc. These identities coexist and intermingle in intricate ways, showing a trace of this or a side of that identity in various circumstances. The new political and social realities add new identities to this intricate web and slowly but surely change the existing identity system.
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The intellectual critique of viewing language and ethnicity as phenomena cast in stone is of little empirical value, however, if people at a grass-roots level do not perceive it in this way. Whether this holds here or not will be answered in the analysis of the empirical part of this thesis (Chapter 4).
The work by Louw-Potgieter and Giles (1988) represents one of the first detailed studies that conceptualised South African ethnolinguistic identity, i.e. Afrikaner ethnicity, in the context of a social-psychological paradigm. They predicted that in communities where language is central to identity, which is undoubtedly the case in the Afrikaner community, strategies to impose, affirm or deny this identity would culminate in linguistic strategies.44 Afrikaans is doubtless the language that has received the greatest attention with reference to sociolinguistic studies that involve the complex relationship between language and ethnic identity; a fact that reflects the socio-political history of the country. Recently, Webb and Kriel (2000)45, Bosch (2000)46 and Giliomee (2003) have investigated the position of Afrikaans in post-apartheid South Africa in more depth. Several South African scholars have in recent years been concerned with the emerging of new ethnolinguistic identities in post-apartheid South Africa.
Barkhuizen and De Klerk (2000), for instance, first investigated ethnolinguistic dynamics in an Eastern Cape army camp. They argue, inter alia, on the basis of their empirical evidence, that English is widely perceived as the neutral language, which however, does not imply that people give up speaking their mother tongues.
In constrast, respondents of the studies formed groups based on a shared
According to Louw-Potgieter and Giles (1988: 126) there are two main propositions linked to language: First, when language forms a very important attribute of ethnolinguistic group membership, strategies of identity management might centre on the group's language. And second, language is not a-contextual, and might therefore be combined with other important membership attributes in these strategies of identity management.
45 Discussing Afrikaans as a basic constituent of Afrikaner nationalism, Webb and Kriel (2000) shed light on the functions of the language in a new political environment.
4 Bosch (2000) discusses Ethnicity markers in the Afrikaans language with a focus on the ethnic consciousness surrounding the history and standardisation of Afrikaans and its varieties. She identifies distinct ethnicity markers in Afrikaans lexical items, naming practices, jokes, and politeness strategies and basically examines the role of the language in creating an ethnic identity for the Afrikaners within a post-apartheid South African state.
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ethnolinguistic background, but use English with members of the out-group in order to improve communication.47
Slabbert and Finlayson (2000) studied urban communities and investigated ethnolinguistic identity construction against the background of the theoretical framework of linguistic acts as 'acts of identity' (LePage and Tabouret-Keller 1985). Essentially, the investigation indicates that a static perception of ethnolinguistic identities in the new South Africa is indeed not timely, as urban Africans tend to cross apartheid-erected ethnolinguistic boundaries on a regular basis. They describe urban identity in post-apartheid South Africa as an "an emerging new hybrid ethnic identity that is marked by a specific relationship to the nine ethnic categories that the policies and practices of apartheid have drawn for African people" (Slabbert and Finlayson 2000: 132).
There is an evident paucity of qualitative ethnolinguistics examining African- language speakers, in particular with regard to urban and township environments.
This thesis aims, among other things, at filling this gap. IsiZulu speakers are often regarded as carrying a distinctive, well-defined and exclusionist ethnolinguistic identity, as Mngadi (2000) simply argues, "Zulu people are proud and conservative people". One of the main concerns in this study is to find out whether the abovementioned simplistic view of Zulu ethnolinguistic identity has any empirical sociolinguistic foundation.
The article further takes into account situational variables, such as the specific environment of an Eastern Cape army camp. In this context it is revealed that the army is seen as the common group.
The members of this group, therefore, also have a shared identity, a feeling of unity, which creates loyalty among its members and gives each member a sense of belonging (Barhuizen and de Klerk 2000).
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