To Bry or not to Bry: The Social Meanings of Afrikaans Rhotic Variation in the South Cape Yolandi Ribbens-Klein KLNYOL002 Supervisor: Proff Ana Cape Deumert Town Co-supervisor:y Prof o Rajend Mesthrie Thesis Presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Universit in the School for African & Gender Studies, Anthropology & Linguistics FACULTY OF HUMANITIES UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN May 2016 i The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University of Cape Town Plagiarism Declaration 1. I know that plagiarism is wrong. Plagiarism is to use another’s work and to pretend that it is one’s own. 2. I have used the Harvard-UCT (author-date) convention for citation and referencing. Each significant contribution to and quotation in, this thesis from the work, or works, of other people has been acknowledged through citation and reference. 3. This thesis is my own work. 4. I have not, and will not allow, anyone to copy my work with the intention of passing it off as his or her own work. 5. This thesis/dissertation has been submitted to the Turnitin module (or equivalent similarity and originality checking software) and I confirm that my supervisor has seen my report and any concerns revealed by such have been resolved with my supervisor. Full Name: Yolandi Ribbens-Klein Student number: KLNYOL002 Signature: Date: 14 May 2016 ii Acknowledgements This has been a long journey, and I have received assistance from many benefactors, supporters and empathisers along my way. I would like to acknowledge some of them and individually thank them for the role they played in helping me reach my destination. Firstly, I was privileged to have received excellent guidance and supervision from two scholars I respect and admire immensely: Prof Ana Deumert and Prof Rajend Mesthrie. Their different supervising styles were very complementary. I am truly grateful for the all the time and effort they both spent on reading and commenting on my drafts. Beyond that, they were also generous with themselves, meeting with me frequently not only to discuss my work, but also to share professional insights and personal experiences from their lives as academics and researchers. Throughout my postgraduate career, they provided me with many opportunities to learn, teach and do research, which strengthened my intellectual and professional growth in addition to the completion of this dissertation. Finally, they both gave me financial support in the form of the following bursaries and scholarships: Prof Deumert’s project Mobile Literacies – Digital Communication and Information Access in a Multilingual Society, Challenges and Opportunities (2010-2012; South African Netherlands Research Programme on Alternatives in Development); Prof Mesthrie’s National Research Foundation grant (2010-2012), and his South African Research Chair (SARChI) project Migration, Language, and Social Change (2013-2016; NRF). I also received funding from the University of Cape Town’s Lestrade scholarship (2010-2012). Secondly, I want to thank the fluctuating members of our Linguinees Post-Grad group, who took the time to read many (if not most!) of my chapters over the years; they often challenged me with questions, and they gave valuable feedback and suggestions when I felt stuck. Many of them were true comrades (they know who they are!). I also want to thank other readers of my chapter drafts, especially Dr Heather Brookes and Dr Tracey Toefy, and Susanne Becker for introducing me to MAXQDA. Finally, Faiza Steffenson provided invaluable administrative support, as well as friendship. Thirdly, the people who participated in my study. Many of them were not simply participants, such as my fieldwork assistant and his family. I am grateful to be able to still think of them as friends. While I was deeply immersed in editing and revisions, I revisited my interview list to review the pseudonyms. I was struck by a sense of loss – of how the practice of anonymising the participants in a way turned very real, warm and generous people into iii faceless strangers. All of them will never feel like strangers to me, and I warmly thank them for being so open and giving of their time and for sharing their knowledge about local life with me. Finally, I deeply thank my spouse Karin, my other-mother Des, my parents Hector and Linda, as well as my siblings Riana and John. My small little family was immensely supportive and encouraging, and unbelievably forgiving and patient. iv Abstract To bry or not to bry: The Social Meanings of Afrikaans Rhotic Variation in the South Cape This dissertation investigates the social meanings of Afrikaans rhotic variation in a town in the South Cape region of the Western Cape Province in South Africa. The study combines approaches to ‘place as location’ (traditional dialectology and sociolinguistics) and ‘place as meaning’ (ethnography and linguistic anthropology) to explore the relationship between geographical place, local social meanings and linguistic variation. Theoretically, I make use of the concept of indexicality, following Silverstein’s (2003) indexical orders and Eckert’s (2008) indexical fields. To date, there is no previous study that explores Afrikaans variation from these perspectives. The study therefore contributes to the development of Afrikaans linguistics. The participants are residents of Houtiniquadorp, which was a mission station in South Africa’s colonial era and declared a Coloured residential area during apartheid. In South Africa, place has been politicised due to colonialism and apartheid. I argue that the racialisation of places contributes to Houtiniquadorpers’ sense of locality and belonging. The linguistic form I focus on is Afrikaans /r/. Afrikaans phonetics texts describe alveolar-r [r] as standard, and uvular-r ([ʀ] or [ʁ]; bry-r) as a non-standard, regional feature. In Houtiniquadorp, [ʀ] and [r] variants of the (r) variable are used. My data collection methods were semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. The linguistic variants were quantified from the interview data and description tasks. The qualitative data analysis focused on the participants’ narratives about places, lived experiences, and meta-linguistic commentary. I discuss three different sets of results, all of which investigate how people in Houtiniquadorp use Afrikaans /r/ to index locality, belonging, and other forms of social meanings, particularly in the context of social and geographic mobility. I analyse metalinguistic comments, the frequency use of rhotic variants, and the use of variants in interaction. Uvular- r forms part of many Houtiniquadorpers’ repertoires, and the participants show varying degrees of awareness of the sound as locally, and socially, meaningful. The results show that while uvular-r is an emplaced sound (i.e. a regional stereotype or dialect feature), the sound has various other non-place meanings that index macro-social categories such as residential status, gender and age. Finally, by looking at participants who use both variants, I argue that they use variation to index meaningful moments during the interview interactions. v Contents Plagiarism Declaration ............................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. iii Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... v Contents .................................................................................................................................... vi List of Figures ............................................................................................................... ix List of Tables ................................................................................................................. x List of Maps ................................................................................................................... x Translations and transcription conventions .............................................................................. xi Chapter 1 General introduction .................................................................................................. 1 1.1. Studying rhotic variation in Afrikaans: the emergence of a research project ......... 2 1.2. Background: place, race and Afrikaans in South Africa ......................................... 5 1.3. Theoretical and conceptual frameworks ................................................................. 7 1.4. Objectives and research questions ........................................................................ 10 1.5. Research design and methods ............................................................................... 11 1.6. Dissertation outline ............................................................................................... 13 Part I Frame and Context: Situating the Study of Afrikaans Rhotic Variation .............. 15 Chapter 2 A sociolinguistics of place and indexicality ............................................................ 16 2.1. Introduction ..........................................................................................................