When: 27 November 2024, 16.15 - 17.45
Where: Unitobler F001, University of Bern
Zoom: https://unibe-ch.zoom.us/j/7931254771
The sociolinguistic study of the multilingual Global South suffers from self-imposed methodological limitations inherited from the assumption that its language dynamics are too ‘fluid’ to be accounted for systematically. Multilingual Namibia might disprove this assumption, if one looks at it from combined quantitative and qualitative perspectives. I first show, based on Namibian real speech data, that Namibian language repertoires, which one could characterize as combining indigenous languages, Afrikaans, and English, vary along two salient dimensions, namely, degrees of ethnic marking and degrees of urbanity. Afrikaans, Namibia’s historical lingua franca and the native language of most Namibian Whites and ‘Coloureds’, acts as a low-status symbolic attribute of urbanity that one feels pressured to combine with English, the high-status language. Experimental phonetic and grammatical data on Afrikaans and English closely reflect Namibia’s language ideologies, which are inferable from real speech data. Namibian Afrikaans reveals high ethnoracial fragmentation, in line with its low status, while Namibian English displays women-driven convergence into a high-status South-African-sounding variety linguistically aligned with the Afrikaans-speaking ‘Coloured’ middle classes against a backdrop of lingering White-Black polarization. These observations suggest that mixed methods can deliver fruitful and accountable insights into variation in the Global South, whose patterns can be fit into adjusted variationist frameworks.
Bio
Gerald Stell is currently an associate professor at the University of Lausanne after holding faculty positions in Hong Kong and the West Indies. His field of expertise focuses on multilingualism and variation in postcolonial lingua francas. His current research projects focus on Namibia’s multilingualism, as well as co-variation patterns in African Englishes and Frenches.
