Xhosa in town (revisited) – space, place and language
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Ana Deumert
Abstract
This article looks at a particular type of migration, that is, the often cyclical and pendulum-like movements from the villages of the Eastern Cape to Cape Town (South Africa). The ethnographic analysis focuses on the semiotic practices migrants engage in as they make the city their home, and develop urban styles of speaking and being (i.e. fashion themselves as urban personae). Drawing on Bank (2011) and Dick (2010, 2011), these two processes are referred to as place-making and people-making. Two urban ways of speaking are discussed in some detail: the emblematic use of English material in an isiXhosa frame (indexing aspiration and mobility), and the symbolic meanings of Tsotsitaal as a quintessentially urban speech style which indexes social as well local (neighborhood) identity. However, as speakers navigate the complex, shifting and often stylized variety space of the city they draw not only on speech forms which are indexical of urbanity, but also on “deep” isiXhosa, that is, a style of speaking which evokes the normativities of traditional, rural authenticity.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Introduction
- Mobility, migration and sustainability: re-figuring languages in diversity
- Rural-urban and south-north migrations and language maintenance and shift
- Xhosa in town (revisited) – space, place and language
- Maintenance, identity and social inclusion narratives of an Afrikaans speaker living in New Zealand
- Unintended language maintenance: the English Congregation of a Baptist Chinese church in Western Canada
- Reconstructing heritage language: resolving dilemmas in language maintenance for Sri Lankan Tamil migrants
- “Foreign workers” in Singapore: conflicting discourses, language politics and the negotiation of immigrant identities
- Book Review
- Book Review
- Shifting Language Attitudes In North-West Amazonia
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Introduction
- Mobility, migration and sustainability: re-figuring languages in diversity
- Rural-urban and south-north migrations and language maintenance and shift
- Xhosa in town (revisited) – space, place and language
- Maintenance, identity and social inclusion narratives of an Afrikaans speaker living in New Zealand
- Unintended language maintenance: the English Congregation of a Baptist Chinese church in Western Canada
- Reconstructing heritage language: resolving dilemmas in language maintenance for Sri Lankan Tamil migrants
- “Foreign workers” in Singapore: conflicting discourses, language politics and the negotiation of immigrant identities
- Book Review
- Book Review
- Shifting Language Attitudes In North-West Amazonia
