by Charlyn Dyers
One of the untold stories about language is the large percentage of Xhosa learners in former coloured schools and the ways in which they adapt their language skills. Research done at Wesbank, one of the newest townships in Cape Town, showed that the ongoing migration from the rural areas to its cities is exerting strong changes on the language practices of the young, as they learn to cope with new living spaces where languages and cultures converge.
Wesbank, established in 1999, was one of the first formal low-cost housing developments in the new South Africa, where groups formerly housed separately by law could live together. It consists of small housing units, a high school, three primary schools and a supermarket, but there are no public amenities such as a community centre, parks or sports fields. Despite the provision of housing and basic services, the community is still characterised by poverty with unemployment higher than 61%. Of approximately 29,000 people, 73% are mixed-race, mainly Afrikaans-speaking Coloured people, 25% are Xhosa people and a further 2% are White, Asian or from Somalia, Nigeria and the Congo.
It can be argued that everyone in Wesbank is a migrant from elsewhere, and that
each member of this ‘created’ community now has to negotiate her own group, this new space and an individual identity within it. New social networks have had to be created, and people have had to learn to cope very quickly with the languages used within communal areas.
The ways inhabitants devise to function within such a variety of languages and cultures have been described by academics as transidiomatic and transcultural practices to draw attention to the constant processes of borrowing, bending and blending of languages into new modes of expression. They have also broadened the notion of multilingualism to mean not only what people can or cannot speak, but what their environment enables or disables them to speak. Different areas in Cape Town which have developed distinct linguistic profiles may have different enabling and disabling effects on the language use of its migrants.
Many of the older Wesbank inhabitants expressed to our research team the challenges faced by them as parents around family cohesion, parental control and the exercise of traditional practices and values. These parents felt alienated in the new township and referred to the rural areas where they were coming from as a “heartland” and strongly identified with it as an idealised place. Even the teenage respondents did not feel an association with their urban township, stressing their migration from the Eastern Cape and the particular village that they were coming from. The strong rural links that families retain through traveling back and forth during Easter, Christmas or for family events, contribute to the continuing vitality of their Xhosa. They believe rural Xhosa to be of ‘deeper’ and ‘purer’ variety than the ‘light’ urban version.
Despite these close rural bonds, the rural variety of Xhosa soon shows signs of being modified. Adolescents and teenagers find themselves attracted to the urban slang spoken by the city youngsters, whom they respectfully call “amajoin”- people who come from the urban to the rural area for a visit. The term itself is a blend of Xhosa (“ama” meaning person or persons) and English (join) and literally means ‘those who join or link the cities with the rural areas’. The older members of the community maintain that “amajoin” was not always a term of respect, but was used to label those who dropped out of school in rural areas and then had to go to the cities to make a living. Over the years the meaning had changed into somebody to envy.
Once the rural children arrive in the urban areas, they prefer to use what they already know of the urban varieties in order not to be marked as “ibharu” (Afrikaans word baar meaning uncivilized) someone backward. But although the urban vernacular is rapidly making inroads into the rural varieties, the positive attitude towards the rural variety persists.
At Wesbank High School, one-third of the learners are Xhosa mother-tongue speakers. Most of them learn Xhosa as their first language and English as their second language, while a minority chooses English as first language and Afrikaans as second language. The vernacular spoken by the Xhosa learners shows increasing signs of code-mixing with Afrikaans and English:
Ek sê (Afrikaans for ‘I say’) bafobethu! . . . . molweni ni alright? (Hi guys, how are you, are you alright?)
Ku grand akhoneks (adapted from the Afrikaans ‘niks’, meaning ‘nothing’)
(Fine no problem.)
The above conversation is an example of what I would classify as Flaaitaal (the language of city slickers) as opposed to Tsotsitaal. The term “Transtaal” is perhaps even more apt given the strong evidence of borrowing and blending that are so typical of transidiomatic and transcultural practices.
Among Grade 8 learners a close personal identification with Xhosa was found:
IsiXhosa sabalulekile kubantubamaXhosa ngo xasisenza amasiko siye sithethe isiXhosa sethu esisifumana emabeleni oomamabethu, xasithe tha ezilwimi ziminzi abazali bethu abakhulu abasiva. (Xhosa is important to the people of the Xhosa because our Xhosa we get from the breast of our mothers. When we are speaking these many languages the elders do not hear us.)
This example of a pupil newly arrived in Cape Town, shows her knowledge of correct Xhosa sentence formation, idiomatic expression and Xhosa culture.
IsiXhosa sibdulekile ngukuba ekhaya sisebenzisa sona kunye nasecaweni sisebensisaso and isiXhosa ndisincanebeleni linamawam. (Xhosa is important because it is our home language and we use it at church as well.)
This pupil has been in Cape Town for at least a year. His language use is beginning to show evidence of code switching (the use of ‘and’), and there are more errors in spelling and grammar, particularly, at the level of concord.
IsiXhosa sibaluleke ngokuba Umntu wesiXhosa asazi ngoba awonukwazi ukuba uthi
ungumXhosa phakathi kwabanye abaXhosa ube uthetha elinye ilwimi luhlazo kutho
oko. (You can’t be a Xhosa person among the other Xhosa speakers if you speak
another language, that will be a disgrace.)
This pupil has been in Cape Town for approximately four years. There is again
evidence of concord errors as well as the abbreviation of the negative form. The
normal word order has been dramatically simplified, with certain prefixes simply
omitted.
More evidence of how surroundings enable or disable the language knowledge of learners came forward during individual interviews.
L. is a Grade 10 learner who arrived in the Western Cape in 2005. His mother, a matriculant, works as a security guard. L. says that he uses Xhosa in his dreams and when speaking to himself. Xhosa predominates at home, but he feels comfortable using English and Tsotsitaal (mixed with some Afrikaans) with his Xhosa and Coloured friends. But he may not use any Afrikaans in front of his mother, because she doesn’t like the language. Xhosa is the dominant language at his church, he reports that Afrikaans and English are also used to accommodate non- Xhosa-speaking congregants. He speaks Xhosa to his girlfriends.
A. is another Grade 10 learner, arrived in the Western Cape in 2003. Her parents both
completed high school. Her father works as a security guard. A. reports using Xhosa
when talking to herself, but ‘with my family of eight people, we mix all three
languages, English, Afrikaans and Xhosa. My father is the one who speaks
Afrikaans more than the rest of us’. At the shops in Wesbank, she uses English, She
also uses English in her interaction with Coloured friends, but ‘. . . some Afrikaans
gets mixed in as well’. At church English is the dominant language, although some hymns are in Xhosa.
What we observe in these narratives is how a particular urban environment can lead to a kind of truncated multilingualism in which linguistic competencies are organized topically on the basis of domains or specific activities. This does not mean that all people are fully competent in all the different languages they use. For example, a teenager may have picked up urban slang in one language from his peers, but be unable to interact in that language when talking to an older family member.
In general positive attitudes of black communities towards English were confirmed when Grade 9 pupils provided reasons why they feel good about English:
. ‘It helps me to communicate with others’;
. ‘It’s important to find work’;
. ‘It will change my life by leading me to employment’;
. ‘I feel very good about English. Xhosa is my home language and is good for
me and my culture. About English I feel like a White man, rich and not
poor . . . I can say this language is the best’;
. ‘I can’t go anywhere without English. It is important to use it overseas. English
is the no.1 language for communication’;
. ‘English is important because there are so many languages here in South
Africa we need to understand each other so we can communicate in English’.
The references to English were mainly outwardly directed, to the bigger, different, outside spaces where the language appears most dominant. The pervading view of English in Wesbank was as an instrument of spatial and social mobility which could move them out of the township and situations of poverty.
Language shift and loss are always part of a wider pattern of economic dispersion and social shifts, and it is therefore very likely that the continued migration from the rural areas to the cities currently underway in South Africa, will continue to strongly affect people’s patterns of language use and attitudes.
(Prof Charlyn Dyers teaches in the Department of Linguistics, University of Western Cape)
August 22, 2010
Education, Featured