INTRODUCTION

Indian South African English (henceforth ISAE) is worthy of the attention of sociolinguists and scholars concerned with new Englishes, for a variety of reasons. It offers the opportunity of examining in a relatively fossilised form (on account of former rigid segregative tendencies in South Africa) the evolution of a dialect of English under less than perfect conditions concerning educational and social contact with target-language speakers. It also provides, again in a relatively fossilised form, the opportunity of studying the changes a language undergoes as it shifts from L2 to L1.

This chapter has two aims: (a) to complete the sociohistorical background to language maintenance and shift among Indian South Africans begun in the article on Indian languages (chap. 8, this volume); and (b) to examine the consequences of social history on linguistic and sociolinguistic structure, manifest in the dialect of English spoken by Indians in KwaZulu-Natal.

As a prelude to the history of ISAE the reader is referred to the background of indenture and immigration set out in chapter 8. Historical records suggest that the vast majority of Indian immigrants (perhaps 98 per cent –see Mesthrie 1992b: 12) had no knowledge of English. The language of the new colony that Indians learnt quickest was the pidgin, Fanakalo. For communication among themselves Indians used an Indian language (usually Bhojpuri or Tamil) and sometimes Fanakalo. Generally, the use of English among Indians in nineteenth-century Natal was the exception rather than the rule.