Book contents
- Youth Language Practices and Urban Language Contact in Africa
- Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact
- Youth Language Practices and Urban Language Contact in Africa
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Series Editor’s Foreword
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Language Contact and Structure in Urban IsiXhosa and Associated Youth Languages
- 2 Not ‘Deep’ but Still IsiXhosa:
- 3 Rethinking Youth Language Practices in South Africa:
- 4 Tsotsitaals, Urban Vernaculars and Contact Linguistics
- 5 Grammatical Hybridity in Camfranglais?
- 6 Sheng and Engsh in Kenya’s Public Spaces and Media
- 7 Exploring Hybridity in Ivorian French and Nouchi
- 8 Authenticity and the Object of Analysis:
- Index
- References
4 - Tsotsitaals, Urban Vernaculars and Contact Linguistics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2021
Book contents
- Youth Language Practices and Urban Language Contact in Africa
- Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact
- Youth Language Practices and Urban Language Contact in Africa
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Series Editor’s Foreword
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Language Contact and Structure in Urban IsiXhosa and Associated Youth Languages
- 2 Not ‘Deep’ but Still IsiXhosa:
- 3 Rethinking Youth Language Practices in South Africa:
- 4 Tsotsitaals, Urban Vernaculars and Contact Linguistics
- 5 Grammatical Hybridity in Camfranglais?
- 6 Sheng and Engsh in Kenya’s Public Spaces and Media
- 7 Exploring Hybridity in Ivorian French and Nouchi
- 8 Authenticity and the Object of Analysis:
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter discusses the feature pool of the different tsotsitaals in terms of not just vocabulary, but morphology and especially syntax. To answer these contact-related questions, I argue that standard language, non-standard urban varieties and youth language practices (tsotsitaals) need to be studied together as a package for their commonalities, differences and the ways in which they relate to each other. I do this partly by summarising early South African approaches and assessing how they have been improved by attention being given to the urban varieties, as spoken by a wider community than just adolescent and young males in a particular in-group or informal mode. I reanalyse two studies of isiZulu-based tsotsitaal of the Johannesburg area by Ngwenya (1995) and Gunnink (2014), concluding that this tsotsitaal does not have an independent syntax from the urban variety of isiZulu.
Keywords
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- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
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