To bry or not to bry: the social meanings of Afrikaans rhotic variation in the South Cape

• Main Author: Ribbens-Klein, Yolandi
• Other Authors: Deumert, Ana
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2017
• Subjects: Linguistics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22809

This dissertation investigates the social meanings of Afrikaans rhotic variation in a town in the South Cape region of the Western Cape Province in South Africa. The study combines approaches to 'place as location' (traditional dialectology and sociolinguistics) and 'place as meaning' (ethnography and linguistic anthropology) to explore the relationship between geographical place, local social meanings and linguistic variation. Theoretically, I make use of the concept of indexicality, following Silverstein's (2003) indexical orders and Eckert's (2008) indexical fields. To date, there is no previous study that explores Afrikaans variation from these perspectives. The study therefore contributes to the development of Afrikaans linguistics. The participants are residents of Houtiniquadorp, which was a mission station in South Africa's colonial era and declared a Coloured residential area during apartheid. In South Africa, place has been politicised due to colonialism and apartheid. I argue that the racialisation of places contributes to Houtiniquadorpers' sense of locality and belonging. The linguistic form I focus on is Afrikaans /r/. Afrikaans phonetics texts describe alveolar-r [r] as standard, and uvular-r ([ʀ] or [ʁ]; bry-r) as a non-standard, regional feature. In Houtiniquadorp, [ʀ] and [r] variants of the (r) variable are used. My data collection methods were semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. The linguistic variants were quantified from the interview data and description tasks. The qualitative data analysis focused on the participants' narratives about places, lived experiences, and meta-linguistic commentary. I discuss three different sets of results, all of which investigate how people in Houtiniquadorp use Afrikaans /r/ to index locality, belonging, and other forms of social meanings, particularly in the context of social and geographic mobility. I analyse metalinguistic comments, the frequency use of rhotic variants, and the use of variants in interaction. Uvularr forms part of many Houtiniquadorpers' repertoires, and the participants show varying degrees of awareness of the sound as locally, and socially, meaningful. The results show that while uvular-r is an emplaced sound (i.e. a regional stereotype or dialect feature), the sound has various other non-place meanings that index macro-social categories such as residential status, gender and age. Finally, by looking at participants who use both variants, I argue that they use variation to index meaningful moments during the interview interactions.