Segmental phonology

InSAfE has been studied mostly as a contact variety that involves a great deal of syntactic variation. If less attention has been paid to its phonetics, it has to do with the paucity of researchers working on the accents of varieties of South African English (SAfE) rather than any intrinsic qualities of InSAfE phonetics. On the contrary, InSAfE holds the promise of subtle variations along the following dimensions:

(a) Five substrate languages belonging to two distinct language families: Dravidian (Tamil, Telugu) and Indo-European (Bhojpuri-Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, Konkani and Sindhi/Meman dialect);

(b) Links with IndE (the English of India);

(c) Links with South African varieties of English, especially varieties spoken in KwaZulu-Natal;

(d) Emergence of a core InSAfE phonology as younger speakers lose contact with the languages of their grandparents’ generation;

(e) Ongoing acculturation amongst middle-class speakers to “General” and “Cultivated” varieties of SAfE as the rigid barriers between young people of different backgrounds weaken, especially in the post-apartheid schoolgrounds;

(f) Regional variation within InSAfE, involving the main dialect in KwaZulu-Natal and smaller pockets in other provinces – Gauteng, Eastern Cape and Western Cape.

The description below is based on my analysis of tape recordings carried out in the mid-1980s, reported in Mesthrie (1992: 34-43) for fieldwork, (1992:136-141) for phonetics. These have been supplemented by more recent recordings in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In addition I rely on earlier discussions by Bailey (c 1985, unpublished notes), Naidoo (1971) and Bughwan (1970).