446 Rajend Mesthrie, Ed. the Book Under Review Is a Dialect

446 book reviews Rajend Mesthrie, ed. A Dictionary of South African Indian English. Cape Town: uct Press, 2010, xxviii and 260 pp. ISBN 978-1-91989-536-9. The book under review is a dialect dictionary that records the words of a variety of English which developed out of language contact and second language acquisition during language shift amongst the Indian population in South Africa. It is not an inclusive dictionary because its focus is on the word stock that is specific to this part of the population in South Africa and thus excludes the items that are shared with the rest of the local population, as well as borrowings from Indian languages that have become part of global mainstream English (e.g. bungalow, shampoo or bangle). The dictionary is of interest to a broad range of scholars and language users: sociolinguists studying the devel- opment of new Englishes and those specifically interested in varieties of English in the diverse Indian Diaspora; lexicographers with a particular interest in borrowing; speakers of South African English who come across words specific to this ethnic variety in daily life; or even literary scholars interested in works written by South African Indian authors. It is possible to contextualize the dictionary within the lexicographic work done on contact varieties of English more generally, and within the develop- ment of these varieties more specifically. According to Schneider (2007: 52) dictionaries play an important role in the evolution of New Englishes because they promote endonormative stabilization. In a similar vein, Algeo (1992: 210) distinguishes three stages in the lexicographical history of nations such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa: at stage one, only slang or dialect usages of the new variety are taken note of; at the second stage, British dictionaries start recording the new words from the (former) colonies; and finally, lexicographers compile dictionaries that take the usage in the new nation as the norm. This last stage in the lexicographical history of a national variety marks the achievement of linguistic independence. English in South Africa became a codified language in this sense with the publication of A Dictionary of South African English (1978), A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (1996) and the South African Concise Oxford Dictionary (2002). South African English is obviously not a monolithic entity but comes in different regional and ethnic varieties, one of them being South African Indian English (saie), which has a strong regional base in the province of KwaZulu Natal. Contact between English, local African languages (notably Zulu), and Indian languages (Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu and Dakhini) dates back to the period when indentured labourers were brought to the colony to © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/19552629-00702013 <UN> book reviews 447 work on the sugar cane plantations. In fact, the dictionary was published 150 years after the arrival of the first indentured labourers in the province of Natal. Additional influence from Gujarati, Meman and Konkani can be traced back to subsequent migration of Indian merchants between 1875 and 1911. Indian South African English is thus not a homogenous ethnic variety, either, but ranges from usage that is acrolectal, i.e. close to the local variety of standard English, to more basilectal varieties with obvious structural influence from the substrate that goes beyond accent and lexical borrowings. The book under review is thus not simply a dictionary of standard SAIE but attempts to record the lexis of all varieties on the lectal cline, as well as different registers (e.g. informal, jocular, slang, vulgar). At the same time, the author is keen to point out that, contrary to popular expectation, what is peculiar to SAIE is not limited to slang (p. xiv). While the dictionary is based on sociolinguistic inter- views, written texts and the author’s knowledge of the variety (p. ix), its aim is not merely to describe the lexis peculiar to the Indian population in South Africa, but also to make a contribution towards codification and standardiza- tion, especially with respect to the spelling variation attested in the community: “It is hoped that the suggested spellings of headwords in a consistent fashion will give guidance to future writers in the dialect and perhaps help create a standard orthography that represents the phonetics of SAIE without looking too ‘foreign’ to be English” (p. xiii). The front matter provides background information, among other things, on the underlying methodology (ix–xiv) and the linguistic background to South African Indian English (1860–2010, xxi–xxviii). Users are provided with a map to guide them through the different parts of the dictionary entries (p. x) and they are given non-technical definitions of the register and etymological labels (p. xi–xii), spelling conventions and pronunciation guides (p. xvii–xx). In addi- tion to the usual information on part of speech, pronunciation and meaning, the entries provide some encyclopedic background information (including usage in other varieties of Indian English), spelling variants and illustrations (typically in the form of quotations from literature or made-up examples based on the author’s inside knowledge of saie). Related words based on the headword are described within the entry of the headword (e.g. dhāl-rōti, a type of unleavened Indian bread stuffed with crushed and seasoned yellow lentils is listed under dhāl, n. and not rōti, n.). The short sociolinguistic history of South African Indian English allows users unfamiliar with this variety to place the lexicographic information in the main part of the dictionary in the wider con- text of this variety of English, detailing e.g. the contacts with the local Zulu community in Natal and influence from Fanagalo, the historical lingua franca (based on Zulu with some traces of English and Africaans, p. xxi–xxii). journal of language contact 7 (2014) 425-459 <UN>.

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