English in South Africa: Contact and Change

Abstract

Since the end of apartheid and white-minority rule with democratic, non-racial elections in , South African society has undergone major change. The African National Congress came to be the dominant party in government, and society opened up considerably with much interaction due to the lifting of restrictions on the living places and movements of various groups, the result being the greater presence in South African public life, in the media, in higher education and in the government of the non-white population of the country (Webb ). The enfranchisement of the indigenous populations of South Africa has had consequences for both the European heritage languages in South Africa (Gilmour ). The social and cultural status of Afrikaans (McCormick , van Rooy and van den Doel ) – the continuation of Cape Dutch Vernacular (Roberge ; Deumert ) spoken by the first European settlers (van Rooy, Chapter  in this volume) – was threatened in the s and into the s, as it was associated with the apartheid era, despite the fact that it is spoken by a sizeable and mixed proportion of the country’s population. Nonetheless, a shift from Afrikaans to English in strongholds such as the Western Cape has been documented (Anthonissen ). English has also been spreading to the indigenous groups in South Africa to a much greater extent than before, and the increasing gentrification of certain sections of the black population, due to the opening of