English and the (re)production of race

While language has been central to the social construction and ascription of racial categories in South Africa, the language/race relationship has not been a focus of sociological or sociolinguistic study. As both McKinney (Reference McKinney2007a, Reference McKinney2007b) and Mesthrie (Reference Mesthrie2012) show, race is a highly complex and contested concept in South Africa and globally. The falsity of race as a biological construct (Omi and Winant, Reference Omi, Winant, McCarthy and Crichlow1993) and the fact that race as socially constructed is a highly heterogeneous and unstable category (Hall, Reference Hall, Donald and Rattansi1992; Rattansi, Reference Rattansi and May1999) has been convincingly demonstrated. However, what continues to puzzle and disturb analysts is the ongoing purchase of static race categories in everyday life and people's sense making of their experiences (see Soudien, Reference Soudien2012). Thus, while race exists neither as a biological reality nor as an essentialist signifier of homogeneous experiences shared by social groups, it is pervasive in everyday discourse, as are its daily material effects.

Previously I have argued that the historical racial labelling of varieties of English in South Africa, such as White South African English, Coloured English, South African Indian English and Black South African English (e.g. Lanham, Reference Lanham and de Klerk1996; Mesthrie, Reference Mesthrie, Schneider, Burridge, Kortmann, Mesthrie and Upton2004; van Rooy, Reference Van Rooy, Schneider, Burridge, Kortmann, Mesthrie and Upton2004; Bowerman, Reference Bowerman, Schneider, Burridge, Kortmann, Mesthrie and Upton2004), contributes, albeit unwittingly, to the essentialist (re)construction of race, as such labels construct the false impression that all people of the same ‘race’ speak the same variety of English. Mesthrie's (Reference Mesthrie2010) research on the deracialisation of the GOOSE vowel in South African English, which shows Black middle-class females who attend/ed previously White schools adapting to the norm of fronting the GOOSE vowel, a ‘prestige White middle-class norm’ (p. 3) provides a welcome contrast to this as does his recent research on the dynamics of Coloured and Indian English in five South African cities where he points out that ‘the criss-crossing of dialect and ethnicity is an interesting one that can produce anomalies that fly in the face of the simplistic racial categorization of South Africa in former times’ (Mesthrie, Reference Mesthrie2012: 391).

What then do we find in the ways in which young people label their own and other's use of English? I will argue through the data presented below that young people's linguistic ideologies (‘sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use’, Silverstein, Reference Silverstein, Clyne, Hanks and Hofbauer1979: 193) and language practices show a simultaneous sedimenting and destabilising of race categories. Furthermore the prestige attached to White varieties of English contributes to constituting the ongoing normativity of whiteness, and othering (at times stigmatisation) of blackness in desegregated suburban schools.

Students in three schools spoke about ‘White English’ as ‘proper English’, marking this as a prestigious variety. In extract 1 below, taken from an interview with Gugu, a female learner at one of the Johannesburg co-ed schools, the notion of ‘White English’ as a prestige variety is reinforced. Here Gugu and the researcher are discussing different kinds of English and Gugu begins talking about some of her ‘stuck up friends’ who speak ‘posh’:

Gugu's description of her friends' use of English, ‘it's wow!’, indicates that she finds it impressive. In considering the way in which these ‘stuck up girls’ speak, Gugu shows her association of ‘White people's English’ with snobbery and furthermore with a particular kind of elite consumption in the reference to exclusive international fashion designers such as Vuitton and Gucci. Similarly, on another occasion where students at this school were discussing varieties and different accents of English in their English lesson, Gugu speaks about ‘Louis Vuitton English’ as a kind of ‘posh’ English (video recorded English lesson, 13 April 2005, Fairview). ‘Louis Vuitton’ English speaks of the social class dimension in different accents and varieties of English in South Africa; Gugu is not merely linking posh English to White speakers but also to wealth and the ability to consume or at least to the desire for elite consumption. Gugu's exclamation ‘it's wow!’ in referring to her friend who is ‘Black as Black’ speaking like a ‘White person’ also highlights the continued power of racial labelling of accents and brands of English as well as people's expectations that one should be able to identify ‘race’ from audible features, the phonological aspects of the variety of English used.

In extract 2 below, taken from an interview with two Grade 10 girls at the same school, they initially struggle to describe the kind of English they use, and eventually draw on the resources of racial labelling to do this.

The students' characterisation above further reproduces racial categorisations of the different varieties of English present in South Africa. If one were working with a static, unified category of blackness, there would be some irony in Lulu's emphatic description of her English as ‘White people's’ type of English, especially when she addresses the researcher (a Black male himself) saying ‘you know how Black people [speak]’. Lulu's English is described as ‘good’ by her friend and then as ‘White people's type of English’ which conflates ‘good’ English with ‘White’ English. However, despite these statements, Lulu is clearly working with heterogeneous categories of ‘Black’ and positions the researcher as being differently Black from her mother. Lulu goes on to clarify what she means here: she is referring to people, like her mother, who are a product of township or rural schooling (‘Black schools’). This relates to the work that has been done on Black South African English (BSAE) in South Africa, which also sees this form of English as largely a product of Department of Education and Training (DET), i.e. the apartheid government department for former Black schools or ex-DET schooling (cf de Klerk & Gough, Reference de Klerk, Gough and Mesthrie2002).

In the Cape Town girls' school where I conducted research, White students were still in the majority, with Coloured and African girls making up about 40% of the students. I had observed that girls who identified as Coloured were much less likely to use phonological features of White South African English and predominantly used phonological features of Cape Flats English (Finn, Reference Finn, Schneider, Burridge, Kortmann, Mesthrie and Upton2004). In an interview I asked two girls who self-identified as Coloured whether they felt that they needed to ‘speak a particular way to fit in in this school’.

Sumaya, who generally uses the phonology of Cape Flats English, suggests that there is stigmatisation of her use of English in the school where WSAE is the norm. That she does not speak out in class discussions was confirmed by my lesson observations in the English class in particular. Both Sumaya and Cathy's discourses constitute White ways of speaking as the norm in their school environment and Cathy's discourse of race and language in particular shows how expectations about how one will speak are often related to the unspoken practices of racial classification that permeate everyday life. As such these extracts, as well as 1 and 2 above, point to the (re)production of race through language practices and the continuing construction of the normativity of whiteness through the use of features from a White ‘ethnolinguistic repertoire’ (Benor, Reference Benor2010) as well as the stigmatisation of Black South African English and Cape Flats English. At the same time, though, we see the destabilisation of the race descriptor WSAE through the Johannesburg Black girls' description of their own English as like the English of ‘White people’.

In my research I have also analysed the ways in which the prestige of WSAE does not always hold for young Black students attending suburban schools, who continue to live in townships on the periphery of the cities. An interesting illustration of this is seen in the labelling of Black students who attend suburban ex-model C schools and draw on a White ethnolinguistic repertoire as coconuts. In both individual and group interviews across the schools, students consistently identified the label ‘coconut’ as referring to:

• • Black people who speak ‘like a White person’

• • Black people who speak English most of the time

• • Black people who choose to speak English rather than an African language (e.g. in a township or rural setting) or who are unable to speak an African language

• • Black people who are considered to be ‘acting White’ or as ‘Black on the outside but White on the inside’ (McKinney, Reference McKinney2007a: 17)

I argue that labelling practices such as ‘coconut’ are interesting in their reflection of contemporary discourses of ‘race’ in South Africa. Simultaneously challenging and destabilising static categories of ‘race’ as produced by apartheid, they also work to police racial boundaries. While some (relatively privileged) young people can exercise symbolic power through speaking a particular kind of English, others (relatively disadvantaged and without access to middle-class schooling) can exercise such power in their ability to exclude privileged peers from their social networks.

One particular student in the Johannesburg girls' school was explicit in her rejection of racial labelling and categorising according to language use. Maria, who reported her mother as Xhosa speaking and father as Venda speaking, was only rarely observed speaking indigenous South African languages. In one of the group interviews, her classmates accused her of being a snob for speaking predominantly English. Maria strongly objected to this and on several occasions raised the question: ‘If I speak English, does it make me less Black anyway?’ In this repeated question, Maria implicitly challenges the homogenisation constructed by labels such as White South African English (WSAE) and Black South African English (BSAE). She also points to the complex reality of the relationship between ‘race’ and language use as well as to the shifting relationships between ‘race’ and performing identity in South Africa. On a more positive note, however, is the way in which the ‘coconut’ label signifies the ‘sub-cultural capital’ of indigenous languages among African youth in the schools.

English in a linguistic repertoire

Extended observation showed that for African students in all four schools, the use of a prestige variety of English was only one resource in their linguistic repertoires, with African languages widely used by Black students in the informal spaces of the school (e.g. offline conversation in the classroom and outside of the classroom space) (see Ndlangamandla, Reference Ndlangamandla2011). In the interview with Gugu (extract 1 above), she shows her awareness of how she can use the full range of her linguistic resources to perform different identities and to resist the ‘coconut’ label. The interviewer has just asked the learner, Gugu, whether she gets labelled for attending a previously White school.

Gugu produces a hybrid and fluid discourse of subjectivity in the extract. In each case she refers not only to the use of a range of named languages, e.g. English and Xhosa, but links these to different ethnolinguistic identities as well as to distinct geographical spaces (school/suburb, township, Sandton/shopping mall, and rural Eastern Cape). Gugu also shows her understanding of the need to master and deploy different languages and varieties of language in order to be accepted in the sub-cultures she participates in.Footnote ³ Her multilingual repertoire and awareness of language are invaluable in giving her the resources to move across what many other young people might consider impermeable boundaries (e.g. the rural-urban divide) and mutually exclusive geographical spaces, but what Gugu shows to be far more porous, and in continually allowing her to be ‘different and the same’. Gugu signals her awareness of the notion that ‘discourse is a symbolic asset which can receive different values depending on the market in which it is offered’ (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1977: 651).

The final data extract I will discuss is of naturally occurring interaction, collected with a learner wearing a digital microphone during the ‘Living class’, which took place once a week in the Johannesburg girls' school with the aim of teaching students life skills as well as ‘arts and culture’. On this occasion the teachers of two classes had separately arranged for their lessons to take place outside on the school fields. While one class (10Y) waited for their teacher to arrive with sports equipment, some girls began to play circle games involving singing in a range of languages and dancing in a large circle (with call and response as well as rhythmic repetitions). Before long most of the class were singing loudly and dancing in a circle demonstrating considerable skills in both and drawing on their knowledge of local popular youth culture and indigenous languages.

Some distance away, another class, significantly the top performing class, 10A, were seated in a circle with their teacher, Ms A, playing what she described as ‘concentration games’. These included games which focused on listening skills as well as English pronunciation and enunciation such as ‘broken telephone’ and tongue twisters (in the vein of ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’). Not only are the students' bodies controlled as they are seated in a circle with their eyes on the teacher, but the activity itself is designed to (re)produce them as speakers of a particular variety of educated standard South African English or ‘White South African English’. However, two students, Zaza and Thobeka, decide to escape the highly controlled, English-only space and move to join the students playing circle games on the other side of the field. Below is an audio-recorded extract from conversation between the two girls as they do this:

The girls resist their teacher's assimilationist practices hereFootnote ⁴ by leaving her class and moving to join in with another class playing circle games. They also move fluently across different linguistic resources in their repertoires, using both Zulu and English to criticise their teacher, with Zaza appropriating and parodying the teacher's voice in English. Their talk suggests that it is the teacher's disciplining of their bodies, including their speech, rather than English that they are resisting here, although Zaza's parodying of her teacher's voice suggests that she does not aspire to sound exactly like her (White) teacher.