Abstract
The word native is a key term in nineteenth-century British colonial administrative vocabulary. The question is how it comes to be central to the classification of indigenous subjects in Britain’s southern African possessions in the early twentieth century, and how the word is appropriated by colonial citizens to designate the race of indigenous subjects. To answer the question, I construct a semasiological history of native as a word that has to do with the identification of a person with a place by birth, by residence or by citizenship. I track the manner in which speakers invest old words with new meanings in specific settings and differentiate among them in different domains. In the case of native, a signal keyword is recruited to do particular work in several contemporaneous discourses which take different ideological directions as the nature of the involvement of their speakers changes. The result is a particularly complicated word history, and one which offers a clue to the ways in which colonial rhetoric is domesticated in specific settings at the very same time as the colonising power eschews it in the process of divesting itself of its colonies.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Joan Beal and Cathy Shrank for their comments on an earlier draft and to two anonymous reviewers for their advice and additional references. I have also profited from the feedback offered by audiences at the Universities of Strathclyde and Sheffield. All infelicities are mine alone.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- When natives became Africans: A historical sociolinguistic study of semantic change in colonial discourse
- Koine formation in context
- Historical sociolinguistics in colonial New Guinea: The Rhenish mission society in the Astrolabe Bay
- James Buchanan’s use of Anne Fisher’s A new grammar: Towards the development of an English grammar teaching method in eighteenth-century English grammar writing
- Book Reviews
- Nicola, McLelland: German through English Eyes. A History of Language Teaching and Learning in Britain 1500–2000
- Wilcken, Viola: Historische Umgangssprachen zwischen Sprachwirklichkeit und literarischer Gestaltung. Formen, Funktionen und Entwicklungslinien des ‚Missingsch
- Rena Torres Cacoullos, Nathalie Dion & André Lapierre: Linguistic variation: Confronting fact and theory
- Villa, Laura & Rik Vosters: The Historical sociolinguistics of spelling
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- When natives became Africans: A historical sociolinguistic study of semantic change in colonial discourse
- Koine formation in context
- Historical sociolinguistics in colonial New Guinea: The Rhenish mission society in the Astrolabe Bay
- James Buchanan’s use of Anne Fisher’s A new grammar: Towards the development of an English grammar teaching method in eighteenth-century English grammar writing
- Book Reviews
- Nicola, McLelland: German through English Eyes. A History of Language Teaching and Learning in Britain 1500–2000
- Wilcken, Viola: Historische Umgangssprachen zwischen Sprachwirklichkeit und literarischer Gestaltung. Formen, Funktionen und Entwicklungslinien des ‚Missingsch
- Rena Torres Cacoullos, Nathalie Dion & André Lapierre: Linguistic variation: Confronting fact and theory
- Villa, Laura & Rik Vosters: The Historical sociolinguistics of spelling