Reduplication in South African Englishes: A what-what borrowing gets a life of its own

Abstract

Reduplication is more common in South African English (SAfE) than in many other varieties of English but has not received much attention in research. This article examines the use of the reduplication what-what. The scope of reduplication in English globally is surveyed before considering the use of reduplication in SAfE alongside possible influences of other languages in the local linguistic ecology. Thereafter, a corpus analysis is undertaken of two corpora, representing user comments on television soap operas (2006–2023) and news and comments from the NOW corpus (2010–2023). The results indicate that what-what conveys the meanings of Etcetera (‘there is more like this’), Whatever (a general indicator of something vague that is not spelled out), and a Specific thing or quality (which is deliberately not named). While many reduplication forms can be linked to antecedents in other South African languages, the results show that what-what has acquired new meanings since coming into use in SAfE, which creatively extend the potential of the construction beyond mere transfer from other languages. Reduplication is not only an entrenched grammatical construction for coining new words in SAfE, but it has also become a way to express local identity for users of SAfE.