Xhosa English as an institutionalised variety of English: In search of evidence

This paper aims to examine the English of Xhosa speakers (a significant proportion of speakers of Black South African English, since Xhosa is the second largest indigenous black language in South Africa), in terms of Williams’ (1987) criteria for Non-native Institutionalised Varieties of English (NIVEs). Using a corpus-based approach, the article reports on the results of analyses of a range of linguistic features in the newly-developed corpus of spoken Xhosa English (over 500 000 words), in an effort to go some way towards providing the evidence so necessary for the endorsement of newly established norms, and to counteract the pull of native English norms, “which tend to result in the stigmatisation of some of the major indexical markers of the non-native varieties” (Bamgbose 1998:3).