scholarly journals The embedded indexical value of /s/-fronting in Afrikaans and South African English

Linguistics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Bekker ◽  
Erez Levon

AbstractThis paper examines the indexical value of /s/-fronting in White Afrikaans and in White South African English (WSAfE). Prior research on this feature has shown that fronted articulations of /s/ in WSAfE serve as a regional and social indicator of the wealthy northern suburbs of Johannesburg, and anecdotal evidence suggests that the feature carries a similar meaning in White Afrikaans. This study therefore aims to examine whether the variable carries similar meanings across the two languages. Data are based on the evaluative reactions toward different experimental stimuli that were presented to 214 Afrikaans-English bilinguals in South Africa during a modified matched-guise task. The results indicate that /s/-fronting in a man’s voice is perceived in similar terms in White Afrikaans and WSAfE though it carries somewhat different meanings across the two languages when it occurs in a woman’s voice, a difference related in turn to different approaches to gender across the two speech communities. The results of this research, and the indexical value of /s/-fronting in the two languages, are therefore only understandable in terms of certain sociohistorical and sociological differences between the two speech communities. The article ends with some discussion relating to the possible source of the relevant similarities and differences, i.e., parallel innovation or sociophonetic transfer.

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-124
Author(s):  
Lenatha Wentzel ◽  
Kerry De Hart

The expansion of the manufacturing sector is one of the South African government’s focus areas for economic growth and employment creation. The research on which this article is based identified additional incentives, applicable to the manufacturing sector, which the South African government could introduce to encourage investors to choose the South African manufacturing sector as a desired investment destination. The incentives provided to manufacturing companies by the governments of Malaysia and Singapore and those provided by the South African government are compared in order to examine the similarities and differences between these incentives. In the light of these findings, recommendations are made for additional incentives in South Africa to promote investment in South African manufacturing companies and reduce some of the barriers that prevent local and foreign investment in the country.


Author(s):  
Cornelia van Graan

In this article, I attempt to determine the position and value of ubuntu in the law of post-apartheid South Africa as well as to determine how ubuntu compares to humanitarianism. To achieve this goal, I examine both ubuntu and humanitarianism but I go further than merely an examination of the two concepts in isolation; a determination of the similarities and differences also takes place. The terms to be used in this study will be ‘traditional ubuntu’, which refers to ubuntu as known and understood by the indigenous people of South Africa, and humanitarianism, as known in the Western civilization.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Schmulow

This article examines the implementation of the Twin Peaks model of financial system regulation in South Africa, the purpose of which is to create a financial system stability regulator, and a financial system consumer protection and market conduct regulator. It examines the historical development of Twin Peaks and its regulatory enforcement principles. It then analyses the similarities and differences between Twin Peaks in Australia (upon which the South African reforms are based) and South Africa. Finally the article provides concluding observations.


Mousaion ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
Elwyn Jenkins

Roy Campbell’s The mamba’s precipice (1953), a novel for children, is his only prose work of fiction. This article examines three aspects of the book, namely its autobigraphical elements; its echoes of Campbell’s friendship with the writers Laurie Lee and Laurens van der Post; and its parallels with other English children’s literature. Campbell based the story on the holidays his family spent on the then Natal South Coast, and he writes evocative descriptions of the sea and the bush. The accounts of feats achieved by the boy protagonist recall Campbell’s self-mythologising memoirs. There are similarities and differences between The mamba’s precipice and the way Van der Post wrote about Natal in The hunter and the whale (1967). Campbell’s novel in some respects resembles nineteenth-century children’s adventure stories set in South Africa, and it also has elements of the humour typical of school stories of the ‘Billy Bunter’ era and the cosy, mundane activities and dialogue common to other mid-century South African and English children’s books.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-444
Author(s):  
Amanuel Isak Tewolde

Many scholars and South African politicians characterize the widespread anti-foreigner sentiment and violence in South Africa as dislike against migrants and refugees of African origin which they named ‘Afro-phobia’. Drawing on online newspaper reports and academic sources, this paper rejects the Afro-phobia thesis and argues that other non-African migrants such as Asians (Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis and Chinese) are also on the receiving end of xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa. I contend that any ‘outsider’ (White, Asian or Black African) who lives and trades in South African townships and informal settlements is scapegoated and attacked. I term this phenomenon ‘colour-blind xenophobia’. By proposing this analytical framework and integrating two theoretical perspectives — proximity-based ‘Realistic Conflict Theory (RCT)’ and Neocosmos’ exclusivist citizenship model — I contend that xenophobia in South Africa targets those who are in close proximity to disadvantaged Black South Africans and who are deemed outsiders (e.g., Asian, African even White residents and traders) and reject arguments that describe xenophobia in South Africa as targeting Black African refugees and migrants.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiffany L Green ◽  
Amos C Peters

Much of the existing evidence for the healthy immigrant advantage comes from developed countries. We investigate whether an immigrant health advantage exists in South Africa, an important emerging economy.  Using the 2001 South African Census, this study examines differences in child mortality between native-born South African and immigrant blacks.  We find that accounting for region of origin is critical: immigrants from southern Africa are more likely to experience higher lifetime child mortality compared to the native-born population.  Further, immigrants from outside of southern Africa are less likely than both groups to experience child deaths.  Finally, in contrast to patterns observed in developed countries, we detect a strong relationship between schooling and child mortality among black immigrants.


2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Hill ◽  
Sylvia Poss

The paper addresses the question of reparation in post-apartheid South Africa. The central hypothesis of the paper is that in South Africa current traumas or losses, such as the 2008 xenophobic attacks, may activate a ‘shared unconscious phantasy’ of irreparable damage inflicted by apartheid on the collective psyche of the South African nation which could block constructive engagement and healing. A brief couple therapy intervention by a white therapist with a black couple is used as a ‘microcosm’ to explore this question. The impact of an extreme current loss, when earlier losses have been sustained, is explored. Additionally, the impact of racial difference on the transference and countertransference between the therapist and the couple is explored to illustrate factors complicating the productive grieving and working through of the depressive position towards reparation.


Derrida Today ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-36
Author(s):  
Grant Farred

‘The Final “Thank You”’ uses the work of Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche to think the occasion of the 1995 rugby World Cup, hosted by the newly democratic South Africa. This paper deploys Nietzsche's Zarathustra to critique how a figure such as Nelson Mandela is understood as a ‘Superman’ or an ‘Overhuman’ in the moment of political transition. The philosophical focus of the paper, however, turns on the ‘thank yous’ exchanged by the white South African rugby captain, François Pienaar, and the black president at the event of the Springbok victory. It is the value, and the proximity and negation, of the ‘thank yous’ – the relation of one to the other – that constitutes the core of the article. 1


2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Stephanus Muller

Stephanus Le Roux Marais (1896−1979) lived in Graaff-Reinet, South Africa, for nearly a quarter of a century. He taught music at the local secondary school, composed most of his extended output of Afrikaans art songs, and painted a number of small landscapes in the garden of his small house, nestled in the bend of the Sunday’s River. Marais’s music earned him a position of cultural significance in the decades of Afrikaner dominance of South Africa. His best-known songs (“Heimwee,” “Kom dans, Klaradyn,” and “Oktobermaand”) earned him the local appellation of “the Afrikaans Schubert” and were famously sung all over the world by the soprano Mimi Coertse. The role his ouevre played in the construction of a so-called European culture in Africa is uncontested. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the rich evocations of landscape encountered in Marais’s work. Contextualized by a selection of Marais’s paintings, this article glosses the index of landscape in this body of cultural production. The prevalence of landscape in Marais’s work and the range of its expression contribute novel perspectives to understanding colonial constructions of the twentieth-century South African landscape. Like the vast, empty, and ancient landscape of the Karoo, where Marais lived during the last decades of his life, his music assumes specificity not through efforts to prioritize individual expression, but through the distinct absence of such efforts. Listening for landscape in Marais’s songs, one encounters the embrace of generic musical conventions as a condition for the construction of a particular national identity. Colonial white landscape, Marais’s work seems to suggest, is deprived of a compelling musical aesthetic by its very embrace and desired possession of that landscape.


Mousaion ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tinashe Mugwisi

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) and the Internet have to a large extent influenced the way information is made available, published and accessed. More information is being produced too frequently and information users now require certain skills to sift through this multitude in order to identify what is appropriate for their purposes. Computer and information skills have become a necessity for all academic programmes. As libraries subscribe to databases and other peer-reviewed content (print and electronic), it is important that users are also made aware of such sources and their importance. The purpose of this study was to examine the teaching of information literacy (IL) in universities in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and the role played by librarians in creating information literate graduates. This was done by examining whether such IL programmes were prioritised, their content and how frequently they were reviewed. An electronic questionnaire was distributed to 12 university libraries in Zimbabwe and 21 in South Africa. A total of 25 questionnaires were returned. The findings revealed that IL was being taught in universities library and non-library staff, was compulsory and contributed to the term mark in some institutions. The study also revealed that 44 per cent of the total respondents indicated that the libraries were collaborating with departments and faculty in implementing IL programmes in universities. The study recommends that IL should be an integral part of the university programmes in order to promote the use of databases and to guide students on ethical issues of information use.


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