This is a repository copy of When natives became Africans: A historical sociolinguistic study of semantic change in colonial discourse. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/114972/ Version: Accepted Version Article: Fitzmaurice, S. orcid.org/0000-0002-8804-1987 (2017) When natives became Africans: A historical sociolinguistic study of semantic change in colonial discourse. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 3 (1). pp. 1-36. ISSN 2199-2894 https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2017-0001 Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing
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[email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ When natives became Africans: A historical sociolinguistic study of semantic 1 change in colonial discourse 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.