| This study is an investigation of the speech practices and language attitudes of people in two communities of South Africa's North West Province. It seeks to explicate an apparent contradiction between prevalent forms of talk on the one hand and opinions about language that deny or downplay this speech behavior on the other. Although the research itself was language-based, the overall issues with which the dissertation is concerned range beyond language to other forms of social practice, including economic and social mobility, changing conceptions of ethnicity, and other aspects of identity politics in post-apartheid South Africa. Its conclusions, therefore, draw connections not only between language practice and linguistic ideologies, but also between language and the social institutions with which it shares relations of mutual-constitutiveness.;"Street Setswana" is the name given to the range of hybrid speech forms that combine Setswana grammar with lexical material from a variety of South African languages, including English, Afrikaans, Tsotsitaal, and Zulu. Street Setswana is spoken by people of both sexes, all ages, and all socio-economic strata in Tlhabane and Phokeng, two communities in the former Tswana "homeland," Bophuthatswana. Street Setswana indexes urban identity, and by association, membership in the South African nation, in its speakers. As such, it stands in contrast to standard Setswana (the written form of the language taught in school). The allegiance people express to the standard form is seen as a reflection of residual attachment to an ideology of ethnonational purity promoted by the "homeland" and apartheid regimes. Standard Setswana, an official language in post-apartheid South Africa, is moribund in these two communities and is even found to be losing ground as a language of everyday interaction in the language classrooms of government schools. |
