Travelling terms and local innovations: The tsotsitaal of the North West province, South Africa (original) (raw)

A visual and linguistic comparison of features of Durban and Cape Town tsotsitaal

Tsotsitaal is a South African language phenomenon spoken in urban centres around South Africa which involves the use of a range of linguistic and semiotic resources as part of a process of styling an urban identity. The tsotsitaal phenomenon originated in the urban context of Johannesburg's racially mixed townships in the 1940s and it can now be found in all provinces. Although there are calls to recognise it as a ‘national language’, it is not clear what features the different regional varieties share. This article considers two regional examples of tsotsitaal – from Durban and Cape Town – to unpack their common features. The data analysed here was gathered in 2012, and involves video recordings of 22 young adults, aged between 16 to 25, speaking tsotsitaal together. The data was analysed to determine: the grammatical framework of each example; the lexical items both common to, and unique to, the two sites; topics areas of relexicalisation; and the use of gestures and other semiotic markers. The article demonstrates that tsotsitaals in geographically distant Cape Town and Durban share lexicon, gestures and relexicalised topics, but cautions that regionally and contextually specific features need to be taken into account in broad claims about, and descriptions of, tsotsitaals.

Overview of the Tsotsitaals of South Africa; their different base languages and common core lexical items.

Tsotsitaal in South Africa has many characteristics in common with other African ‘urban youth languages’), for example, it incorporates lexical innovation, metaphor and neologisms, its origins are in criminal argot, and it is used primarily by male youth in urban centers possibly as a marker of modernism and being ‘streetwise’. It can be considered as a set of language resources rather than a ‘language’ in any traditional sense of the term, and one of the more interesting characteristics of tsotsitaal in South Africa is its existence in multiple base languages – all the official languages in South Africa (11 in total) have their own accompanying tsotsitaal. Other non-official languages, including mixed forms of language in highly multi-lingual townships such as Soweto, also have their variety of tsotsitaal. This paper gives examples of tsotsitaals which utilize a range of base languages – Setswana (Tswana); Tshivenda (Venda); Sesotho sa Lebowa (Northern Sotho); Sesotho (Sotho); IsiZulu (Zulu); Sepedi (Pedi); and IsiXhosa (Xhosa) – to demonstrate the core features of the phenomenon, and to try to outline why the tsotsitaal phenomenon is an exemplar of youth language practice as fluid repertoire.

Slang registers, code-switching and restructured urban varieties in South Africa: An analytic overview of tsotsitaals with special reference to the Cape Town variety

Journal of Pidgin & Creole Languages, 2013

This paper examines the status of an informal urban variety in Cape Town known as Tsotsitaal. Similar varieties, going by a plethora of names (Flaaitaal, Iscamtho, Ringas) have been described in other South African cities, especially Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban (see also Sheng in Kenyan cities). This paper seeks to describe the essential characteristics of Cape Town Tsotsitaal, which is based on Xhosa, and to argue for its continuity with similar varieties in other South African cities. However, this continuity eventually calls into question many of the previous assumptions in the literature about Tsotsitaal and its analogues: e.g. the thesis that these varieties necessarily involve code-switching, or that they are pidgins, even ones that are creolising in some areas. More generally, this paper serves several purposes: (a) to comment on and elucidate why there is a proliferation of often contradictory names, (b) to examine the degree and types of switching in the different varieties, and (c) to clarify the relationship between what are essentially tsotsitaal registers and the urban languages they are part of.

The structure of Tsotsitaal and Iscamtho: code switching and in-group identity in South African townships

This paper examines the structure of two varieties, Tsotsitaal and Iscamtho, that are spoken predominantly by males who live in the Black urban townships of South Africa. While many think that tsotsitaal and Iscamtho lack predictable structure, this paper argues that all versions follow the same type of morphosyntactic constraints that structure code switching as well as playing a part in other language-contact phenomena. Data come largely from conversations recorded in Soweto, a major township outside Johannesburg. As in-group markers, the varieties are characterized by much slang and lexical variation across versions of the same variety. Tsotsitaal can be identified as a variety, or set of versions, with a nonstandard version of Afrikaans as its matrix language, while Iscamtho versions have a South African Bantu language — usually Zulu — as their matrix language. Issues considered include these: how are Tsotsitaal and Iscamtho similar and different from other language-contact phenomena; to what extent do their structures support the matrix-language frame model of Myers-Scotton (1993a)?

Special Issue: Tsotsitaal studies: urban youth language practices in South Africa

The study of non-standard urban forms of African languages in South Africa, or what I will refer to here as ‘tsotsitaal studies’ (based on Mesthrie’s 2008 broadening of the term ‘tsotsitaal’ to include a number of related varieties), has been a focus of sociolinguistic research for several decades. This introduction to the special issue will briefly summarise the history and development of these studies, in order to situate the articles in this issue and their relevance to, and advancement of, the field.

Language contact in African urban settings: The case of Sepitori in Tshwane

South African Journal of African Languages, 2014

There is undisputed evidence that the use of so-called non-standard varieties of language in South Africa is on the increase, and serves as an important communication bridge for a supranation that has many people of different ethnicities living side-by-side in different urban settings in the country. This paper illustrates, using Sepitori (also called ‘Pretoria Sotho’) as a case in point, that non-standard varieties should be explored further with a view to institutionally recording, formalising and supporting them. The paper does this through, first, showing that Sepitori is a mixed language that is used as a lingua franca by many people; second, by re-visiting the literature that demonstrates the important and crucial role played by non-standard varieties in a multilingual society, such as, South Africa, particularly with regard to formal settings (e.g., classrooms, formal meetings, and the media); and, third, by using the strength of such literature to call for a change in attitudes by language purists, who should realise that the sooner non-standard varieties are allowed space beyond the use in informal settings, the better it would be for further development of standard varieties.