Multilingual pragmatic markers in South African English

Abstract This article provides a descriptive account of five multilingual pragmatic markers – nje, mara, kanti, vele and kaloku – which are borrowed from indigenous South African languages into South African English, with a view to investigating their frequencies, spelling stability, syntactic positioning, distribution across text types, collocational patterns and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data, which are extracted from the South African component of the Global Web-based English corpus, are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, from a postcolonial corpus pragmatic perspective. The results show that the multilingual pragmatic markers are generally infrequent compared to their English counterparts, their spellings are generally stable and their positions in the utterances are based on their functions. The article identifies nje as an attitudinal marker, a focus particle, an emphasis marker, an intensifier and a marker of shared knowledge, mara as a contrastive marker and kanti as a contrastive marker, an inferential marker and an emphasis marker. Vele is an emphasis marker, while kaloku is an attention marker, a topic orientation marker and an inferential marker. In conclusion, these multilingual pragmatic markers contribute to the distinctive nature of South African English at the pragmatic level.