Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics

The Spanish section of the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at The University of the West Indies at Saint Augustine decided to begin teaching a two hour module of the courses: SPAN 1001 and 1002 to first year students, in the online mode in the academic year of 2014-2015. This paper's principal objective is to reflect upon students' and teachers' perspectives on benefits and challenges of the blended learning mode of delivery for Spanish programme. It examines the online reading and writing module to assess student writing interaction as well as to determine best practice in the teaching of these skills in the foreign language at the tertiary level in a twenty-first century Caribbean context. In order to carry out this reflection, action research was used therefore its data collection consisted of observations of the course design before and after the innovation, student surveys and teacher interviews. Among the most relevant findings are: students and teachers prefer to have an online delivery of this class rather than the previous face to face class; the variety of activities lead to higher interaction among students; change of roles for teachers and students, fostering more active learning among students; and a rise of digital culture for academic purposes. However, some restructuring is required in terms of teachers' feedback delivery and students' and teachers' required time for activities. As recommendations the paper suggests continued promoting of this online module since it develops both technological literacy and higher written interaction in the first year of the Spanish programme.

This volume brings together linguistic, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives on code-switching. Featuring new data from five continents and languages with a large range of linguistic affiliations, the contributions all address the role of social factors in determining the forms and outcomes of code-switching. This book is a significant addition to the empirical and theoretical foundations of the study of code-switching.

In a context where new English varieties from the Outer Circle have been receiving increasing attention, I propose to outline a descriptive approach to their uses and functions on the basis of their patterns of co-occurrence with local languages across intra and inter-ethnic boundaries. The case study I offer is Namibia, a multiethnic and multilingual African country where English has been the sole official language since 1990 without having had much local history prior to that date. The general question that I pose is to what extent and how English is used in informal interactions in Namibia. Considering Namibia’s ethnolinguistic diversity as well as the locally widespread practice of code-switching, the questions I more specifically ask are: What are the patterns of code-switching with which English finds itself associated both within and across Namibia’s inter-ethnic boundaries, and how can they be characterized in terms
of social function? On the basis of a corpus of intra- and inter-ethnic interactions involving a range of Namibian ethnicities, I show evidence of a continuum of linguistic usage ranging from different patterns of code-switching involving English and local languages to more or less monolingual English varieties.
I finally place that evidence within the perspective of new Englishes theory, emphasizing the possible relevance of code-switching patterns to the emergence of indigenized English varieties in general, and of an indigenized Namibian variety in particular.

This article attempts to place the discussion on the relationship between African American and European American vernacular Englishes within a broader context involving another speech community split along ethnic lines, namely South Africa’s Afrikaans-speakers. It specifically attempts to compare observations on the coloured-white linguistic divide within South Africa’s Afrikaans speech community with those made on the black-white linguistic divide in the United States, with the aim of shedding light on the correlation between ethnicity and language variation.
the article first presents ethnicity and its social and linguistic correlates, drawing on literature on AA(V)e and South Africa. It then identities the social and linguistic  features of the American English and Afrikaans speech communities. After
presenting  a  range  of  grammatical  variables  and  their  comparability  across  both speech  communities,  it  provides  an  overview  first  of  the  various  trends  of  grammatical  variation from a mainly variationist perspective, then of Afrikaans-English code-switching, which is treated as a phenomenon that correlates with grammatical variation. It finally attempts to answer the general question whether the U.S. black-white  linguistic  divide  and  the  coloured-white  linguistic  divide  in  South  Africa’s Afrikaans speech community can be referred to as complementary in the study of ethnicity and language variation.

Afrikaans may be called a standard language, but there is some acknowledgement that its standardization should be continued, particularly at the level of grammar. How its standardization should be continued has, however, been hotly debated since the 1990s: should Standard Afrikaans reflect spoken varieties of Afrikaans, or should it instead reflect its own written tradition? At the origin of that debate lies the fear of a widening  gap between Standard Afrikaans and spoken Afrikaans varieties eventually alienating a growing number of Afrikaans-speakers, and undermining its position and status in the process. In today’s context where the visibility of Standard Afrikaans is diminishing, not only in the media but also in education, the course of Afrikaans standardization arguably deserves to be debated from a fresh perspective. But that debate cannot dispense with a clear idea of linguistic variation within the Afrikaans speech community, especially in the informal register. The central question which must be asked in this respect is: How deep is the imprint that Standard Afrikaans has left on the informal registers of Afrikaans (as a result of compulsory education and exposure to the media)? And considering the sociolinguistic settings in which Afrikaans is finding itself today: Is that imprint fading away, and allowing informal spoken Afrikaans to evolve its own rules as a result?     
In order to answer these questions, I built a corpus of White and Coloured informal spoken Afrikaans , subdivided into three distinct age cohorts, contained in seven samples representing the three historical dialect zones of the Afrikaans language area. In the process of data collection, additional geographic subdivisions were provided for, such as the urban/rural divide, and the recent political border that separates Namibian Afrikaans speakers from their South African peers. In order to test the possibility of spoken Afrikaans varieties converging with or diverging from Standard Afrikaans, a total of 15 morphosyntactic variables with a standard variant and a non-standard variant were singled out for analysis. Among these variables are variables whose non-standard variant is typically associated with Coloured varieties, while the distribution of the remaining variables is generally not wholly determined by ethnic factors.
The first step in my analysis consists of looking at the distribution of each of the 15 variables. The overall obtaining picture is that general convergence is sometimes observable with the Standard Afrikaans variant, but sometimes also away from it. Also, there are cases of divergence between samples, i.e. when some of the samples are converging with the Standard Afrikaans variant, while others are moving away from it. An important observation is that Whites generally use the Standard Afrikaans variant. The second step in my analysis consists of a multivariate analysis involving all variables simultaneously in order to allow generalizations on convergence with and divergence from the Standard Afrikaans norm. The overall picture yielded by that multivariate analysis is again one that shows a systematic linguistic gap between Coloured and White Afrikaans varieties, showing White varieties to be linguistically more homogenous than Coloured varieties. What that picture further shows is a general trend of mutual convergence between the South African White and Coloured samples. In other words, Afrikaans varieties (at least in South Africa) are becoming more homogenous without necessarily moving closer to the Standard Afrikaans norm. I argue that this observation should be taken into account while formulating norm selection agendas.
Based on the above observation, there seems to be scope for improving the representativeness of the Standard Afrikaans norm. Enhancing the representativeness of the Standard Afrikaans norm need not entail scrapping specific grammatical variants. Rather, it could mean acknowledging variation by mentioning informal variants alongside their prescriptive equivalents. One merit of this approach is that it reduces the gap between spoken and written registers without doing away with the latter, while also acknowledging ethnic diversity in spoken Afrikaans.

To what extent can ethnic boundaries be transcended in interethnic interactions? We are tackling this question in reference to Namibia, a post-apartheid society marked by a legacy of ethnic and racial divisions. Relying on discourse as a source of data, we identify the strategies employed by Namibians in a range of interview data and semi-experimental inter-ethnic interactions for either accentuating or attenuating inter-ethnic boundaries. We identify these strategies at the levels of ethnic categorization, language choice/variation, and the management of speaker turns, and place them in the perspective of the participants’ perceptions of ethnic Others. Our findings suggest that ethnic categories are salient in our data, although they do not exclude identification with superordinate categories in specific contexts. Our findings also show that patterns of categorization are reflected in language choice and turn management in the interactional context.

The study of code-switching has  been  mostly  undertaken from  two perspectives that  have  developed apart  from one another, i.e. the grammatical perspective and the conversational perspective. I attempt in this chapter to join these  two perspectives by testing  the hypothesis that  grammatical and  conver- sational forms of code-switching can be jointly predicted via macrosociolinguis- tic factors.  To that  end,  I first show  on the  basis  of sociolinguistically diverse data  from South Africa, featuring language with different degrees  of typological distance (i.e. Afrikaans, English,  Sesotho), that  macrosociolinguistic factors  by themselves can predict  specific grammatical CS patterns irrespective of linguis- tic factors.  I then  proceed to show  that  under certain conditions, there  is evi- dence  in  these  data  of one-to-one relationships  between specific  patterns of grammatical code-switching and  those  conversational code-switching patterns which  Auer (1999) refers to as language mixing  and  language alternation.

This article aims to compare three distinct grammatical and conversational patterns of code-switching, which it tentatively links to three different South African ethnoracial labels: White, Coloured and Black. It forms a continuation of a previous article in which correlations were established between Afrikaans-English code-switching patterns and White and Coloured ethnicities. The typological framework used is derived from Muysken, and the hypotheses are based on his predictions as to which type of grammatical CS (i.e. insertional, alternational, congruent lexicalisation) will dominate in which linguistic and sociolinguistic settings. Apart from strengthening the idea of a correlation between patterns of language variation and ethnicity in general, the article explores the theoretical possibility of specific social factors overriding linguistic constraints in determining the grammatical form of CS patterns. In this regard, it will be shown that – on account of specific social factors underlying constructions of ethnicity – CS between two typologically unrelated languages, namely Sesotho and English, can exhibit more marks of congruent lexicalization than CS between two typologically related languages, namely Afrikaans and English, while – from the point of view of linguistic constraints – insertional/alternational CS would be expected in the former language pair and congruent lexicalization in the latter. That finding will be placed against the background of different pragmatic norms regulating the conversational use of CS within the Black Sesotho-speaking community (which we will describe as ‘language mixing’ in Auer’s sense) and within the Afrikaans speech community (which in the case of Whites we will describe as tending more towards ‘language alternation’ in Auer’s sense, and in the case of Coloureds as occupying an intermediate position between language alternation and language mixing). The summary of findings on grammatical and conversational CS patterns across ethnic samples will finally be placed against the background of ethnicity and its specific definition in the South African context.