Startseite When natives became Africans: A historical sociolinguistic study of semantic change in colonial discourse
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When natives became Africans: A historical sociolinguistic study of semantic change in colonial discourse

  • Susan Fitzmaurice EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 31. März 2017

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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Published Online: 2017-3-31
Published in Print: 2017-4-1

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Heruntergeladen am 11.10.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/jhsl-2017-0001/html
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