Description

Already much discussed within the World Englishes research paradigm, English in Namibia began developing into a dominant lingua franca only from 1990. The study's central research questions are: How does (spoken) English vary in Namibia? Does it form one variety or several? And what is distinctly Namibian about it? The study uses quantitative and qualitative data to answer these questions. The linguistic data consists of naturalistic speech collected among young urban generations and experimentally elicited phonetic and grammatical features. These linguistic data are contextualized via survey data, qualitative interviews, and perceptual data. At first, the study identifies the historical and contemporary uses and functions of English in Namibia compared with other languages. Its informal spoken forms and combinations with other languages are illustrated based on a corpus of intra- and inter-ethnic multilingual speech. The study then zooms in on the phonetic and grammatical features of Namibian English, with a specific emphasis on how these features are socially distributed and whether they form transfers from native languages, innovations, or imports from exogenous English varieties.