Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: sociolinguistics and English around the world
- 1 The UK and the USA
- 2 Ireland
- 3 Urban and rural varieties of Hiberno-English
- 4 Sociolinguistic variation and methodology: after as a Dublin variable
- 5 The interpretation of social constraints on variation in Belfast English
- 6 Canada
- 7 Phonological variation and recent language change in St John's English
- 8 Sociophonetic variation in Vancouver
- 9 Social differentiation in Ottawa English
- 10 New Zealand
- 11 Social constraints on the phonology of New Zealand English
- 12 Maori English: a New Zealand myth?
- 13 Sporting formulae in New Zealand English: two models of male solidarity
- 14 Australia
- 15 /æ/ and /a:/ in Australian English
- 16 Variation in subject–verb agreement in Inner Sydney English
- 17 Australian Creole English: the effect of cultural knowledge on language and memory
- 18 South Asia
- 19 Final consonant cluster simplification in a variety of Indian English
- 20 Patterns of language use in a bilingual setting in India
- 21 Speech acts in an indigenised variety: sociocultural values and language variation
- 22 Southeast Asia and Hongkong
- 23 Stylistic shifts in the English of the Philippine print media
- 24 Variation in Malaysian English: the pragmatics of languages in contact
- 25 Social and linguistic constraints on variation in the use of two grammatical variables in Singapore English
- 26 East Africa (Tanzania and Kenya)
- 27 The politics of the English language in Kenya and Tanzania
- 28 National and subnational features in Kenyan English
- 29 Southern Africa
- 30 Sources and consequences of miscommunication in Afrikaans English – South African English encounters
- 31 Syntactic variation in South African Indian English: the relative clause
- 32 The social significance of language use and language choice in a Zambian urban setting: an empirical study of three neighbourhoods in Lusaka
- 33 West Africa
- 34 The pronoun system in Nigerian Pidgin: a preliminary study
- 35 The sociolinguistics of prepositional usage in Nigerian English
- 36 Social and linguistic constraints on plural marking in Liberian English
- 37 The Caribbean
- 38 Standardisation in a creole continuum situation: the Guyana case
- 39 Gender roles and linguistic variation in the Belizean Creole community
- 40 Sociolinguistic variation in Cane Walk: a quantitative case study
- 41 The Pacific
- 42 Watching girls pass by in Tok Pisin
- 43 Sociolinguistic variation and language attitudes in Hawaii
- 44 Variation in Fiji English
- Index of topics
- Index of place names
30 - Sources and consequences of miscommunication in Afrikaans English – South African English encounters
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: sociolinguistics and English around the world
- 1 The UK and the USA
- 2 Ireland
- 3 Urban and rural varieties of Hiberno-English
- 4 Sociolinguistic variation and methodology: after as a Dublin variable
- 5 The interpretation of social constraints on variation in Belfast English
- 6 Canada
- 7 Phonological variation and recent language change in St John's English
- 8 Sociophonetic variation in Vancouver
- 9 Social differentiation in Ottawa English
- 10 New Zealand
- 11 Social constraints on the phonology of New Zealand English
- 12 Maori English: a New Zealand myth?
- 13 Sporting formulae in New Zealand English: two models of male solidarity
- 14 Australia
- 15 /æ/ and /a:/ in Australian English
- 16 Variation in subject–verb agreement in Inner Sydney English
- 17 Australian Creole English: the effect of cultural knowledge on language and memory
- 18 South Asia
- 19 Final consonant cluster simplification in a variety of Indian English
- 20 Patterns of language use in a bilingual setting in India
- 21 Speech acts in an indigenised variety: sociocultural values and language variation
- 22 Southeast Asia and Hongkong
- 23 Stylistic shifts in the English of the Philippine print media
- 24 Variation in Malaysian English: the pragmatics of languages in contact
- 25 Social and linguistic constraints on variation in the use of two grammatical variables in Singapore English
- 26 East Africa (Tanzania and Kenya)
- 27 The politics of the English language in Kenya and Tanzania
- 28 National and subnational features in Kenyan English
- 29 Southern Africa
- 30 Sources and consequences of miscommunication in Afrikaans English – South African English encounters
- 31 Syntactic variation in South African Indian English: the relative clause
- 32 The social significance of language use and language choice in a Zambian urban setting: an empirical study of three neighbourhoods in Lusaka
- 33 West Africa
- 34 The pronoun system in Nigerian Pidgin: a preliminary study
- 35 The sociolinguistics of prepositional usage in Nigerian English
- 36 Social and linguistic constraints on plural marking in Liberian English
- 37 The Caribbean
- 38 Standardisation in a creole continuum situation: the Guyana case
- 39 Gender roles and linguistic variation in the Belizean Creole community
- 40 Sociolinguistic variation in Cane Walk: a quantitative case study
- 41 The Pacific
- 42 Watching girls pass by in Tok Pisin
- 43 Sociolinguistic variation and language attitudes in Hawaii
- 44 Variation in Fiji English
- Index of topics
- Index of place names
Summary
Introduction
This paper reports on research involving the fine-grained qualitative analysis of interactions between Afrikaans and English speakers in South Africa, in the medium of English. The goal of this research is to see whether the explanation of the sources and consequences of miscommunication between Zulu and English speakers offered in Chick (1985) holds for Afrikaans and English speakers as well. The essence of this explanation is that a mis-match of culturally-preferred interactional styles contributes to asynchrony (see Erickson 1975, 1976, 1978), in the context of which participants misinterpret and misevaluate one another, and that repeated miscommunication of this sort generates negative cultural stereotypes. Asynchrony is the antithesis of conversational synchrony which, Erickson (1975) explains, is the rhythmic patterning of conversationalists' coordinated behaviour that enables them to judge the occurrence in real time of significant ‘next moments’. This information they need in order to accomplish conversational inferencing. As a great number of studies have shown (e.g. Gumperz 1982a, 1982b; Pride 1985), intercultural communication is frequently characterised by asynchrony in which the participants look, sound and feel clumsy, and often miss one another's signals because they occur at unexpected moments. In this paper I present evidence which suggests that, indeed, a mismatch of interactional styles is partly responsible for the asynchrony in the encounters analysed, and I suggest what some of the distinctive features of these putative styles are.
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- English around the WorldSociolinguistic Perspectives, pp. 446 - 461Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991
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