Hip hop identity in a township reality. - Poppunt

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instruction in the mother tongue was extended up to the highest possible level for black children, while the role of Afrikaans increased. At the same time the government gradually eliminated mother tongue English teachers out of the system in an attempt to deny black children access to English mother tongue speakers. This strategy did work effectively and resulted in a very limited contact between black children and native English speakers. Finally this resulted in the development of certain characteristic patterns of pronunciation and syntax, both traceable to the mother tongue, which are now seen as the norms of (spoken) BSAE (de Klerk and Gough: 357). The ultimate goal of this policy fitted the overall idea of apartheid completely. The diversity between people is stressed if everybody is educated in their own mother tongue. This was the idea behind the education and language policies, but looking at the spread of BSAE throughout the whole country amongst the ethnically African population of South Africa, it becomes clear this idea did not have the expected results. When in 1979 pupils were allowed to choose their own medium of instruction, after the first four years of school, the overwhelming majority chose English (de Klerk and Gough: 357). A major reason for this choice was the idea that English was a means for societal and socio-economic improvement, while the indigenous languages were not valued as such by its own speakers, since those languages did not facilitate an upward social mobility in society. Still, a lot of pupils have little exposure to mother tongue speakers of English and varieties of English other than BSAE. All of this has resulted in very mixed levels of competence in English and therefore it is difficult to make estimations of how many South African black people have a knowledge of English. Estimations on this vary between 32 percent and 61 percent (de Klerk and Gough: 358). It is hard to define what exactly is ‘knowledge of English’. This is a continuum, with huge differences between the competence in English of the South African blacks. For the description of the general and most common features of BSAE, we will use several studies that have outlined a number of features. Due to the fact that there is still a big need for more research in this field, there is not really a consensus on what exactly the main features of BSAE are. Therefore we have made a summary of all the features we could find and that often return. We have used examples from our own interviews to make the features more clear. We will restrict ourselves to features that occur rather frequently in the speech of our interviewees. Some authors recognise certain features, while others do not, and sometimes they do not occur frequently in our interviewees’ speech. The latter might be due to the fact that
for example the features of BSAE are based on the English speech of native Zulu speakers, while our black interviewees are all native Xhosa speakers. Next to that, some authors distinguish a selected amount of broad features, while other authors will rather subdivide them in a more restricted series of concrete features. We took examples from almost all of our interviews with our native Xhosa-speaking interviewees, to show that BSAE was frequently used by these interviewees and to show in this way that it is widely spread amongst this population group. Although they use BSAE, it is remarkable that some features occur more frequently than others, of course this is also due to the fact that there is not a final definition of BSAE yet. Certain features are more entrenched or fossiled than others (de Klerk and Gough: 364). In most cases the authors try to find an explanation for these features, which can be found most of the time in the mother tongue of the BSAE speaker, but we will not elaborate on that here, because it is beyond our interest. We can say that these features are thought to relate to both native language transfer as well as universal features relating to principles of language learning and usage (de Klerk and Gough: 363). BSAE also shares grammatical features with a range of new Englishes generally and new Englishes in Africa in particular. Most of the fifteen features that Schmied considers as being characteristic of English in Africa (Schmied: 65), also occur as features of BSAE. Wade (Wade: 3-5) distinguishes five general features, of which we will only use four. Between brackets we give the expected Standard English form. 1) Non-standard use of the progressive, which in fact means that “(…) the distinction between dynamic verbs (describing actions and processes) and stative verbs (describing states of affairs) is blurred in BSAE. Syntactically, stative verbs in Standard English stative do not usually occur in the progressive but in BSAE verbs such as ‘have’, ‘like’, and ‘know’ frequently do occur with –ing forms:” (Wade: 3) I don’t think I’m having (I have) a negative impact towards the community. (Full Stop) The progressive in BSAE “(…) may be used in place of the simple present or ‘will’ future:” (Wade: 3) He’s still an underground producer, but he is making (he makes) nice beats. (Mayja)
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Universiteit Gent Faculteit Lettere
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3. Conclusion 52 4. GANGSTA RAP (KD
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music they make). The concept of id
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the Hoofweg Primary School in Wesba
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There is no further message in the
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adopted it for the name of their gr
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songs, he will perform his own acts
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where the many townships arose. The
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were forced to move during this per
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protests; many people were killed c
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The unemployment rate is very high,
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apartheid state imposed before 1990
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particularly interesting that we fo
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100% perfectly so I wouldn’t be e
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y writing a song in English in orde
Page 31 and 32: If he does not understand the langu
Page 33 and 34: to more than just his people. Not o
Page 35 and 36: 2. Findings When we examine the rep
Page 37 and 38: English is used by our interviewees
Page 39 and 40: The reason why we discuss the topic
Page 41 and 42: Secondly, he tries to motivate yout
Page 43 and 44: apartheid, somebody that passed awa
Page 45 and 46: narrative. As such, the songs are e
Page 47 and 48: “That’s what we doing / make su
Page 49 and 50: man I’ve got guns / yeah right sh
Page 51 and 52: nigga who was like you know not an
Page 53 and 54: “More and more of the kids are re
Page 55 and 56: They are giving advice through the
Page 57 and 58: audience, in the mid nineties, it h
Page 59 and 60: will try to reach the same luxury,
Page 61 and 62: “But it’s being portrayed by th
Page 63 and 64: ecause it suggests it is all right,
Page 65 and 66: In this part we assess the given an
Page 67 and 68: Our interviewees do see a bigger pi
Page 69 and 70: 2.1. Generally accepted opinion and
Page 71 and 72: themselves was: what do bilingual s
Page 73 and 74: Code-switched speech itself by the
Page 75 and 76: used codes (in contradistinction to
Page 77 and 78: ethnic boundaries, and it raises is
Page 79 and 80: 1998a: 272) states that three dimen
Page 81: about seven million black second-la
Page 85 and 86: 2) Omission of articles How many pe
Page 87 and 88: Gough distinguish, but that did not
Page 89 and 90: - to battle: to compete, usually fr
Page 91 and 92: Those guys that I was rolling with.
Page 93 and 94: American code to claim membership o
Page 95 and 96: further on in this chapter, these t
Page 97 and 98: CONCLUSION For a particular segment
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Hip hop identity in a township reality. - Poppunt

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