This chapter tests the hypothesis that a shift from an L1 to a community-dominant language as speakers’ main public language is abrupt, not gradual (i.e., from one grammatical system to another, without implying L1 grammatical attrition). When the situation biased urban Xhosa-English bilinguals in South Africa to speak only Xhosa, many speakers showed Xhosa-English codeswitching (English content words in Xhosa grammatical frames). Such codeswitching does not necessarily predict a shift. Rather, in such a situation the frequency of L2 monolingual clauses (English here) does point to a shift and its abruptness. A cluster analysis divided the sample (N = 48) into three groups based on use of English elements; the ‘front runners’ group showed numerous English clauses.
2024. Students’ Perceived Language Competence and Attitudes Towards Multilingualism at a South African University. Language Matters► pp. 1 ff.
Sands, Bonny
2022. Tracing Language Contact in Africa’s Past. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 84 ff.
Bylund, Emanuel & Panos Athanasopoulos
2015. Motion event categorisation in a nativised variety of South African English. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 18:5 ► pp. 588 ff.
Bylund, Emanuel
2014. Unomathotholoori-radio? Factors predicting the use of English loanwords among L1 isiXhosa–L2 English bilinguals. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 35:2 ► pp. 105 ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. Language Contact and Genetic Linguistics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 41 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.