The comparison of literary representations of dialects with actual
speech samples of the communities depicted is a growing application of
variationist sociolinguistics. Yaeger-Dror, Hall-Lew, and Deckert (2002) examined the contraction of not (e.g.,
she isn't) versus the contraction of the auxiliary in
negation (e.g., she's not) in a number of varieties of
English, using large-scale corpora of various types. From the unscripted
spoken corpora, notably the 1980's Switchboard (SWB) corpus of
telephone conversations gathered by Texas Instruments from all areas of
the United States, Yaeger-Dror and Deckert (2000) found patterns of regional variation in the
territory. Speakers from distinct regions show different tendencies in
using one type of contraction over the other, with southern U.S. speakers
using auxiliary contraction statistically more consistently than northern
U.S. speakers. This pattern is confirmed by a parallel analysis of
presidential speeches for the last 50 years. The southern presidents use
aux-contraction, whereas northern presidents favor
not-contraction. Findings such as these can be used to evaluate
the fidelity of literary representations of dialect. Although Harriet
Beecher Stow, for example, “may have thought she was writing
southern dialogue, the data [concerning negation] indicate that
her ear was from Massachusetts” (Yaeger-Dror et al. 2002:104). This is not necessarily typical. In fact,
the authors show that when people write about the dialects they
do know, they are capable of making subtle characteristics, like
not-contraction, reflect actual regional and ethnic differences.
Other studies comparing dialect usage with literary representations
include work by Jeff Kallen (2002) on, among
other things, the humorous use of Irish English by Irish American
comedians, and Fonollosa (1995) who showed that
the Canadian playwright, Michel Tremblay's use of specific syntactic
locutions by his Joual characters is entirely consistent with actual
working-class speech, as found in the Montreal corpus. See also, Marriott
(1997) in connection with the representations of
class accents in a British war film.
The present article aims to add to this body of work by uncovering the
relation between a gross stereotype or parody of an emerging second
language (L2) and actual interlanguage use. I focus on a single
grammatical feature of South African Indian English dialect (henceforth
SAIE), the use of the verb suffix -ing in contexts wider than
those permitted in formal standard English. The initial analysis from
which the framework arises, draws largely from an earlier paper (Mesthrie, 2002) on a satirical radio series,
Applesammy and Naidoo (1945) in South
Africa. I argue that the arch satirical text systematically flouts the
sociolinguistic principles governing speech as described in variation
theory (Labov, 1972 and subsequently).
Thereafter, I test this framework by subjecting a realist portrayal of the
same dialect by an “insider” to a similar analysis. The work I
examine is the play, The Lahnee's Pleasure, by Ronnie
Govender (c. 1972). Finally, I examine the way a
comic, post-modernist novel, The Wedding, by Imraan Coovadia
(2001) employs the same suffix in a creative
way, without flouting the rules of variation theory. In all three texts
studied, dialect is not just a matter of “local color,” it is
a defining feature.
A brief history of the speech community represented in these texts is
necessary. For most of the 20th century, the largest group of Indians
outside of South Asia were those of South Africa. The growth of this
community stems from a decision by the British government to ship large
numbers of Indians to their colonies as cheap labor in the era immediately
following the abolition of slavery in the early 19th century. Over 150,000
laborers from different parts of India were shipped to the colony of Natal
in the period 1860–1911.1
Natal had not
been a slave-holding colony, having been established in the 1840s.
Historians attribute the need for an outside labor force to the initial
reluctance of the indigenous Zulu people to commit to regular wage
labor.
The laborers came mostly from the provinces that today are
called Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in north India and Tamil Nadu and Andhra
Pradesh in south India. From 1875 onward, smaller numbers of Indians
arrived as voluntary traders from Gujarat and Maharashtra, rather than as
semi-forced labor. A number of Indian languages survived in South Africa
for over a century and are still spoken there, although in declining
numbers (
Mesthrie, 1992a): Tamil,
Bhojpuri-Hindi, Telugu, Urdu, Gujarati, and even smaller numbers of
speakers of Konkani and Meman (a dialect of Sindhi). Few incoming Indians
had a command of English. These included the handful of teachers and
interpreters brought over, and some of the traders. The vast majority of
Indians learned English on South African soil, developing a distinct
dialect, which was initially used for outgroup communication with English
speakers, and which soon developed into an “internal”
lingua franca among subsequent generations of Indians.
Thereafter, in the 1960s and 1970s, it turned into a first language (L1).
SAIE is today a covert badge of Indian identity and unity in South Africa
(see Mesthrie,
1992b:220–221). The dialect
still remains today a continuum of varying grammars, styles, and
abilities, best described in terms of a continuum that comprises three
basic varieties:
basilect—mesolect—acrolect. The
basilect is spoken with the fluency of an L1, though it might not have
been the chronological first language of individuals. Its grammar shows
major differences from the target language (TL). The acrolect is generally
an L1 spoken by some middle-class speakers with access to the standard
early in life. It differs from other varieties of South African English
(henceforth SAE) in phonetics and a few syntactic details (see
Mesthrie, 1992b). The vast majority of SAIE speakers
are mesolectal, having an intermediate grammar that owes much to the
basilect, but which is targeted towards the acrolect especially in more
formal styles. Most mesolectal and acrolectal speakers today have English
as an L1, with those under the age of 40 having a tenuous or no command of
an Indian language. Outside the main frame of SAIE are two groups, the
first of which is of significance to this article. These are
pre-basilectal speakers whose English is decidedly makeshift, while
loosely belonging to SAIE. The pre-basilect (henceforth pre-bas) is a
diffuse interlanguage frozen in an early form by a few speakers (Mesthrie,
1992b:65–70). These speakers' norms
are conspicuously less developed and focussed (in the sense of
Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985) than those of
basilectal speakers, with whom they nevertheless share some syntactic
constructions. Whereas basilectal speakers are part of the SAIE speech
community, pre-bas speakers have very limited social networks, centered on
the home and on an ancestral language like Tamil. They tend to be poor,
little-educated, home-bound, or loners at work. The fifth lect is not of
relevance to this article, but will be cited for completeness:
“post-acrolectal” speakers who use a norm that mediates
between the acrolect and more general KwaZulu-Natal or South African
English.
2 There are also latter day
youngsters who attend private schools, in which the norms of white South
African sociolinguistic networks are operative.
This article examines the ways in which SAIE has been represented in
three very different kinds of texts, with a main focus on the use of the
verb ending -ing. As a baseline, it is first necessary to chart
the myriad functions of this suffix in the basilect. First, the standard
function of marking present progressive aspect (with be + -ing)
is to be found as in (1):
(1) I'm looking for the matches.
This function competes with several others—the four main ones
being: historic present of narration (sentence 2); habitual (3);
perfective (4); past habitual (5); and simple past/preterite (6).
(2) I'm suffering here now and the pain is
getting worse. (‘I was suffering (from chest pains) and the
pain was getting worse’—in a narrative set in the past).
(3) He's travelling to town every day. (‘He
travels to town daily’).
(4) I'm staying this house seven years.
(‘I've been staying in this house for seven years’).
(5) We was talking English at home (‘We used to speak
English at home’).
(6) Hawa, she's telling she cooks an' all.
(‘Don't you remember, she said she (still) cooks and so
forth’).
From these examples we see that SAIE is unusual in using be +
-ing as the historic present of narration, unlike the simple present
of most other dialects (Wolfson, 1979). It is
also unusual in allowing be + -ing in past habitual and preterite
contexts, although the latter may sometimes overlap with the historic
present of narration. Like many second-language varieties of English
(“New Englishes”) SAIE is tolerant of -ing in stative
and habitual contexts (see Platt, Weber, & Ho, 1984:72–73, for other varieties). Although some
L1 varieties in the U.K. and U.S. also allow be + -ing with
statives in sentences like (3) and (4), it is doubtful that they do so to
the same extent as the New Englishes. By contrast, in
“cultivated” SAE, which counts as the local prestige variety,
be + -ing is generally disallowed with stative verbs.3
“Cultivated SAE,” also referred to
as “Conservative SAE” (Lanham &
Macdonald, 1979), is (or used to be) the preferred variety for
serious broadcasting and speech making. In lower sociolects of SAE,
however, the perfective meaning expressed in (4) is
acceptable.
A further consideration is that basilectal and pre-bas SAIE speakers
may use -ing to varying extents without the preceding auxiliary
verb be:
(7) Just like that carrying on, you know. (‘We carry on
/ are carrying on just like that …’).
As (7) shows, absence of be may also occur with pro-drop, but
this is not a necessary condition. At the outset, it is important to
distinguish between the primary function of be + -ing as
a marker of progressive aspect in varieties of English and the use of
-ing as an overgeneralization of the “bare
–ing” form (of gerunds, participles etc.). These are
distinguished functionally, though not always formally, because standard
be + -ing progressives may show the absence of
be in some SAIE lects. Both progressives and bare -ing
verb forms are of interest in this study for the way they have been used
(and sometimes conflated) in written representations of SAIE. Statistics
for the functions of be + -ing among a representative
sample of SAIE speakers are given in Mesthrie (1992b:51–52; 68–70). These and other
related statistics will be provided when analyzing the use of
(be) + -ing in the three literary texts in the following
sections.
STEREOTYPES IN APPLESAMMY AND
NAIDOO
The text of a popular radio comedy series aimed at listeners in Natal
in the 1940s, involving two Indian characters, is of potential importance
in adding SAIE data for a period in which information about colloquial
speech norms is rare. Evolving from earlier sketches on radio involving
Indian characters in the early 1940s, it stabilized as Applesammy and
Naidoo (henceforth A&N). The leading roles were played
by the scriptwriters, Ray Rich and Dusty Cracknell. About their
performances, the creator of the sketches, P. B. Durnford (1946:3–4) wrote:
The popularity of their performances is something no one will
be brave enough to dispute, and I think it worth mentioning that some of
their most ardent fans are the Natal Indian listeners who relish the odd
wisecracks in their own language that “Dusty” Cracknell
frequently interposes. It ought to be more widely known that Mr. Cracknell
is in fact an accomplished linguist and speaks Tamil, Telugu and
Hindustani.
The text of the programs was reproduced in a booklet The
Adventures of Applesammy and Naidoo, carrying the subtitle A book
for young people, based on the stories behind the popular broadcasts of
“Applesammy and Naidoo.” The booklet comprises 25 short
chapters or episodes detailing the misadventures of its two heroes. Much
of the presentation is dramatic, with their direct speech making up
approximately 564 sentences (5681 words).4
The number of sentences is given as approximate, as I did not
count one-word interjections as single sentences, but incorporated them
into sentences that they precede and with which they form a single
discourse unit.
An illustrative excerpt, from the first chapter
(p. 5), is given next.
It is apparent from excerpts like these that the comedy is based on
(and/or builds up) a stereotype of Indians, more specifically of
descendants of Indian indentured workers drawn into an urban environment.
Typical misadventures involving fishing, bee-catching, buying cars,
horse-racing, selling flowers, encounters with the bureaucracy, and so
forth produce stock comedy with great opportunities for stereotyping. The
comedy is not subtle; it demeans the character's actions, attributes
lowly motives to their actions and—more insidiously—draws a
firm line between the ignorant and less than law-abiding Indian characters
and their rather better-informed white characters and young readers. For
example, the very first chapter ends with a disastrous fishing outing for
the characters, “they had lost their rods and their tackle, and were
wet and miserable” (p. 8). The concluding paragraph speaks to the
young reader:
But it really served them right, didn't it? They
shouldn't have broken the law as they did. Anyway that taught them a
lesson, and they never tried fishing in the black-out
again.
The text certainly deserves the attention of the historical
sociologist. Despite itself, it can be seen as serving a serious
function—perhaps a reassurance to the dominant classes of the time
of their own superiority in the face of the growing urbanization of (and
therefore possibilities of greater competition from) people originally
destined for the plantations. An essential part of this reassurance is in
the very choice of medium. The two characters (and a nephew Chinsammy, who
makes a brief appearance in chapter 22) speak in English jargon or
“broken language”; the authorial voice is always in standard
English, as is that of all the white characters. By this means a dichotomy
is set up between “authentic” voice and that of the
“other.”
In Mesthrie (2002) I argued that
A&N is a caricature, rather than a representation that
linguists might draw on for data on SAIE, from a period for which little
other linguistic data exists. This caricature is one that was doing the
rounds in the British Asian Empire since the 19th century. It is also
parallel to the caricatures of African Americans in the U.S., in the radio
series Amos and Andy (Anthony Kroch, personal communication,
2002). Linguistically, some of the features have their roots in Butler
English, a variety spoken by house-servants in British India—the
butler being a rather less dignified figure than that of upper-class
Victorian England. Butler English was documented by Schuchardt (1891), who claimed that English employers also used
the jargon in conversing with their employees. Hosali (2000) showed that this pidgin-like variety survives to
the present day in parts of south India. In Mesthrie (1990) I showed that pre-basilectal SAIE shows many
similarities with Butler English, but that it probably arose independently
in Natal, where it is not a coherently defined entity in the way that the
basilect is. However, because the existence of a similar variety to Butler
English has been reported in at least one other territory (Burma) where
British settlers employed immigrant Indians, it could well have been
transported as a kind of foreigner talk by British settlers in Natal with
prior experience of India. An illustration of such foreigner talk occurs
in George Orwell's Burmese Days (1934):
I have quoted this passage at length because the employer uses one of
the constructions studied in this article, as a kind of foreigner talk
(“can't keeping ice cool” for “I
can't keep the ice cool”). This example of foreigner talk
involves pro-drop and the “bare -ing” form. That is,
-ing is preceded by a modal, rather than by be; and the
Verb + -ing is really a nonfinite form.
It is in the nature of stereotypes that they are based in a small
measure on reality. Apte (1994:4349) cited Brown
(1965) who spoke of a “kernel of
truth” hypothesis in the literature on stereotypes. Some of the
linguistic features of the characters in the text do cluster in Indian
English dialect, and survive in the speech of older, rural, and
less-educated people in the early 21st century. On the other hand, Apte
(1994:4348) affirmed that “a stereotype is
now considered to be an overgeneralization and an uninformed one.”
These remarks apply rather well to the portrayal of SAIE by the
A&N satirists.
The baseline that I will use to illustrate the stereotyping effects in
A&N is the English of the least competent speakers in my
database of the 1980s. Such pre-basilectal speakers are difficult to
follow, even for SAIE speakers who are thoroughly familiar with the rest
of the dialect as a whole. Next I give an excerpt from a male pre-bas
speaker:
I work in the—little bit time—in the Renishaw
Mill; not working in the mill—field, working in the field. I working
with the hoe, too. After this white faller saying “No, no, no, you
go there, by the line, you know ‘line’?” Same place I
got the hurt, here, toe. This time I went there hospital, Khan's
Hospital.
The comparison between characters depicted in the 1940s and pre-bas
speakers of the 1980s is not asynchronous, given that all six pre-bas
speakers of my original database were elderly and loners (and therefore
not likely to have undergone many changes in speech norms in their
lifetime). They would have been around the age of 15 to 25 at the time of
the A&N series—a perfect match with the characters
satirized there. Linguistically, this group seems most appropriate for
comparing SAIE usage with the language of the A&N scripts.
Socially, however, there is a mismatch because the kind of adventurous
persons who had regular (if unequal) contacts with whites would not have
been pre-basilectal. Had Applesammy and Naidoo really been young,
adventurous men living in the 1940s, they would probably be speakers of
the basilect or lower mesolect and shift styles “upwards” in
out-group communication with whites. In other words, the comparison I am
making between pre-bas and A&N (rather than basilect or lower
mesolect and A&N) is more than generous to the
scriptwriter.5
This comparison also irons out
any possible effect of the SAIE dialect having developed over time. That
is to say, the comparison covers the (dubious) possible objection that the
equivalent of today's basilectal speakers might have been
pre-basilectal in the 1940s.
(For the other texts,
The
Lahnee's Pleasure and
The Wedding, it will be necessary
to include basilectal norms, as well.)
In A&N, the two main characters have speaking parts in
which -ing is applied as an ending to almost all verbs,
irrespective of tense, mood, and aspect, as (8) shows.6
There are only a few exceptions in A&N: (a) verbs
that take an -it ending (i.e., verb + cliticized object
it). The most common verb here is got, which occurs
invariantly as the fused form gottit. There is one additional
example of catchit, as in “But did you catchit any fish
master?” (b) the imperative prepositional verb look at,
which occurs five times compared to the imperative form looking
at, which occurs once; and the imperative verbs mind and
come on; and (c) three tokens that I suspect show a scriptwriter
or editor's lapse rather than a genuine effort at showing
variability: “You broked up; I wanting to catch
that fish; When you feeling him pull this
hand…”
(8) But how me I can knowing when that bite he
caming? (‘How could I have known when I got a
bite’)
The range of functions of -ing in A&N is shown
in Table 1.
The functions of -ing in A&N
All attestations of -ing in A&N are nonstandard.
This includes the present progressives, which are standard in semantics,
but nonstandard in form, because they lack a preceding be.
Examples of each of these categories follow.
(9) That policingman's boat he caming this side
Applesammy. (‘The policeman's boat is coming this side,
Applesammy.’)
(10) What you meaning man? (‘What do you mean
man?’)
(11) And he solling plenty honey and he
making lots, lots money. (‘He sells lots of honey and makes
lots of money.’)
(12) They making us cooking7
This gerundive form is not counted in this study, because it
serves an adjectival, not a verbal function.
boys, and we can
getting plenty things to yeating. (‘They'll make us cooks, and
we can (then) get plenty things to eat.’)
(13) Hello Naidoo—ha, ha, you silly pool—you
looking at that chocree8
Bhojpuri-Hindi chokrı
“girl.”
girlses eh? (‘Hello Naidoo—ha ha,
you silly fool, you were looking at girls, hey.’)
(14) But last week you saying that you don't
liking to killing that pigs Applesammy. (‘But last week you
said that you don't like to kill pigs,
Applesammy.’)
Past habitual: (none)9
The reasons for the absence of past habituals is interesting.
This is the tense used for reminiscences and building histories
(“We used to …”). The one-dimensional
stereotypes in A&N do not allow for such building of a
narrative.
(15) Long time me I not yeating that Curry Pish man
Naidoo. (‘It's been a long time since I've eaten curried
fish, man, Naidoo.’)
Infinitive with to, let,
etc.
(16) Come on let's us going watching this race
man. (‘Come on, let's go and watch the race,
man.’)
(17) Me I can pixing that my rod pirst time
Applesammy, then me I can pixing that your rod, eh? (‘Let
me fix my rod first, then I can fix yours, hey.’)
(18) Please master gaving that nurrer one chance
please master. (‘Please give me another chance,
master.’)
A&N thus gives the impression that its characters
don't have a concept of tense, mood, and aspect. They use
-ing simply as a marker of a verb, irrespective of whether it is
progressive in semantics or not, and a fused object marker -it
with got. Only three verbs are exceptions (see note 6 for these
three and the fused form gottit). Table
2 (based on Mesthrie, 1992b) gives the
use of -ing forms (with or without be) for the same
functions among five pre-bas speakers by way of comparison.
The functions of -ing (with or without be) in
pre-basilectal SAIE
Because -ing differs in its semantic function of progressive
marker (with or without be) from its function as a bare suffix,
it is necessary to separate these functions and examine them more closely.
Table 3 details the use of (be) +
-ing in these two functions in pre-bas and A&N.
The use of be + -ing and bare -ing in pre-bas and
A&N
From Table 3 it is evident that
A&N eschews regular forms for all categories of verb: almost
all verbs have a Ø + -ing ending.10
With the single exception of broked as described in
note 6.
This suffix corresponds to the standard progressive in
be + -
ing or it may simply be an overgeneralized bare
-
ing form, equivalent to the standard simple present or preterite
forms. This state of affairs contrasts with that of the pre-bas, which has
be + -
ing as well as Ø + -
ing forms in
stative and nonstative contexts. Moreover, pre-bas does have a majority of
verb forms without
-ing. To show the nature of the stereotyping
of SAIE verbs in
A&N,
Figure 1A
compares the proportion of Ø + -
ing forms to
be +
-ing progressive forms; whereas
Figure 1B
compares the proportion of Ø + -
ing forms to
nonprogressive verb forms without
-ing.
Percentage of Ø + ing verb forms in relation to
progressives in pre-basilect and Applesammy and
Naidoo.
Percentage of Ø + ing verb forms in relation to
nonprogressives in pre-basilect and Applesammy and
Naidoo.
Figure 1A shows that the two databases do
have something in common (the “kernel of truth” hypothesis):
pre-bas does make high use of Ø + -ing forms in
progressive contexts. At the same time, Figure
1A shows quantitative overgeneralization as the relatively high
occurrences of Ø + -ing for progressives in pre-bas are
made even higher in A&N. Figure 1B
shows that pre-bas makes considerably less use of Ø + -ing
in nonprogressive contexts. However, this is ignored in the
A&N stereotype, which treats Ø + -ing in
nonprogressive contexts the same as in progressive contexts.
Whereas Tables 1 and 2 give the raw figures for each environment (or
function) for -ing, Table 4 gives the
proportionate use of -ing to the verbs without -ing in
each environment. Because we are in effect measuring the
overgeneralization of -ing, this time it is necessary to factor
out ordinary progressives requiring be + -ing in
standard English.11
Table 4 is therefore a
revised, more constrained version of Table 3 in Mesthrie (2002:106), which gives the proportions for all
occurrences of be + -ing.
is a diagrammatic representation of
Table
4.
A comparison of the proportionate use of nonprogressive Ø +
-ing per verb function in A&N and
pre-bas
Percentage of forms with nonprogressive -ing per tense
category in Applesammy and Naidoo and the
pre-basilect.
The overall difference between the two sets of bar graphs in Figure 2 is dramatic, revealing the exaggerative
effect of the stereotype more fully than do Figures 1a and
1b:
(a) There is no use of imperatives with -ing in
pre-bas; in A&N they are virtually mandatory.
(b) As infinitive with to, let's etc. the form
-ing is rare in pre-bas; but virtually mandatory in
A&N.
(c) There is no record of -ing being used with a
modal auxiliary like can and must in pre-bas; in
A&N it is mandatory.
(d) There is no use of future -ing in pre-bas,
unlike A&N.
Constructs from variation theory are useful in characterizing the
nature of the stereotyping evident in A&N. It is clear from
Tables 3 and 4 and
Figures 1 and 2
that:
(a) The basis for the stereotype is the use of -ing
by pre-basilectal (and even basilectal) speakers who use -ing
forms fairly often without the verb be in the present
progressive, and who extend it to occasional use in other contexts like
the habitual present or the simple past.
(b) The stereotype presents a variable rule for -ing
as if it is invariant in each of the contexts concerned.
(c) The stereotype overgeneralizes the rule grammatically to
“neighboring” contexts in which pre-bas -ing does not
occur (imperative, future, modal auxiliary).
Furthermore the text as a whole promotes other effects, which are not
presented in Figure 2:
(d) The stereotype overgeneralizes the variable rule socially
insofar as almost all Indian speakers are made to speak like this.12
There are two exceptions: two figures of
authority or of expertise (a police corporal and a horse-racing expert)
are given brief speaking parts in two chapters in rather stilted, colonial
standard English.
(e) The stereotype overgeneralizes the rule stylistically
insofar as the speakers speak in this way in all styles. (See particularly
the authorial comment cited earlier: “said, Naidoo, in the
broken English he always spoke.”)
The gross stereotyping text is thus an antithesis of natural language
usage described in sociolinguistics (e.g., Bell,
1984; Chambers, 2003; Labov, 1972) in which variation is shown to be a
normal form of linguistic behavior. My database shows that even pre-bas
speakers of an L2 show variation in their grammar. Although they do not,
by any means, have advanced abilities in the TL, the forms that do exist
in their interlanguage are seldom invariant. Like the character, Ellis in
Orwell's Burmese Days (1934) the
authors of A&N attempt to suppress this variation and impose
a unidimensional “otherness” to the speech of colonial
subjects. It is interesting that the same grammatical form, -ing
without be, should have been targeted. Orwell's character
insists, “‘Please, master, can't keeping ice
cool’—that's how you ought to talk.” Yet not a
single occurrence of -ing in this context (after modals) occurs
in my pre-bas data, despite 32 opportunities for such use.
Yaeger-Dror (1992) characterizes any
instance of an individual using a linguistic variant more than those
he/she is emulating, as a form of hypercorrection. Since
“correction” towards a prestige norm is not always evident in
studies of traditional (quantitative) hypercorrection of the sort
described by Labov (1966), Yaeger-Dror proposed
the more general term hyperaccommodation, based on the account of
code convergence and divergence between interlocutors put forth by Giles,
Bourhis, and Taylor (1977). Following from this
account, Janda and Auger (1992) described
various types of hypercorrection/hyperaccommodation, including
humorous hypercorrection, which is of relevance here. They characterize it
as a striking kind of downward hypercorrection, occurring when speakers in
the emulating group have higher social status than members of the emulated
group. Janda and Auger (1992:209) characterize
this “mocking process” following from qualitative
hypercorrection in the following way:
(a) Members of some social group attempt to imitate the
speech of another group, for humorous reasons.
(b) They therefore replace one or more native elements from
their own speech with one or more nonnative elements that they believe to
be used by speakers in the group targeted for imitation.
(c) They end up overgeneralizing such a nonnative element to
one or more new environments—a form of qualitative
hypercorrection.
(d) In these environments, members of the target group
actually have either the same form used by the speakers attempting them or
yet a third form.
For examples from African American Vernacular English (AAVE), see
Janda and Auger (1992:209). Baugh (1992) used the term hypocorrection in the
case of adjustments “downwards” toward a less prestigious
dialect variant by speakers of a more prestigious variety. The type of
hypocorrection he described is not done for humorous reasons. His example
is of African Americans brought up on standard American English attempting
to deploy AAVE as a second dialect in certain contexts.
Although Janda and Auger's four-step account of humorous
hypercorrection does apply broadly to the A&N text, the
phenomenon underlying the parody involves so deliberate and invariant a
process that neither the term hypercorrection nor
hyperaccommodation convey the right nuance. The most appropriate
term for the gross stereotyping in A&N seems to be
“mock language”—that is, the use of a lower status
language or dialect in an exaggerated or distorted way by speakers of a
dominant variety, with the intention of stereotyping and parodying
speakers of the dominated variety. Jane Hill (1993) used the term “mock Spanish” for the
appropriation of presumed linguistic features of Spanish by English
speakers in the southwestern United States in casual speech. Hill provided
the example of Hasta la vista, baby, which parodies and devalues
the formal Spanish phrase hasta la vista (literally,
“until—the—seeing”), which signals a sincere hope
for the pleasure of a future meeting. The juxtaposition with the slang
term baby renders the original phrase colloquial and vulgar, as
does the exaggerated intonation in which the phrase would be rendered.
Similarly, Ronkin and Karn (1999) used the term
“mock Ebonics” to describe the vast number of materials on the
Internet that parody Ebonics or African American Vernacular English.
There is a further violation of “naturalness” in
A&N. In Mesthrie (2002) I show that
A&N is an odd mixture of certain early-interlanguage features
used frequently in the interests of stereotyping (e.g., -ing and
the fixed, fused verb-form gottit, see note 6) with more advanced
features (e.g., a range of prepositions and plural nouns) dictated by the
need to be intelligible to its listeners. One should beware of circularity
here, if early interlanguage features simply means
“nonstandard forms more characteristic of A&N than
pre-bas,” and advanced feature means “standard forms
more characteristic of A&N than pre-bas.” There has to
be an independent metric to decide which forms occur in early acquisition
and which occur later. Such independent evidence can be found in studies
of L1 and L2 acquisition. Ellis's summaries (1994:78–100) make it clear that (1)
-ing is a form that occurs first (i.e., before other verb
inflections) in child language and in L2 acquisition; (2) that among
prepositions, in and on are acquired first; (3) that
uncontracted copulas occur before contracted copulas (e.g., are
before 're; is before 's); and (4)
that can't occurs prior to, and is more frequent than,
can. In all these respects, A&N is a poor reflection
of a specific interlanguage level of its characters. There is a reason for
this lack of naturalness, which I term “the interests of the
text.” If A&N were really to reproduce the norms of
pre-bas (or even the basilect), it would be unintelligible to a majority
of its listeners or readers. As I indicated in Mesthrie (1992b:65), the pre-bas is difficult to follow, even
for people familiar with SAIE as a whole. It is little surprise then that
there are some features in which A&N performs in a more TL
way than pre-bas. I illustrated this in relation to prepositions and noun
plurals in Mesthrie (2002).
DIALECT REALISM IN THE LAHNEE'S
PLEASURE
I now turn to The Lahnee's Pleasure (henceforth
LP), a play written by Ronnie Govender, a member of the SAIE
community. The play aims to faithfully represent the L2 working-class
dialect of the mid-20th century. The broader question is whether a native
speaker-writer, knowledgeable about the speech norms of a community, might
nevertheless still be susceptible to the process of linguistic
overgeneralization. In other words, is a degree of stereotyping inevitable
as creative writers seek to impose some order on the multifarious
utterances that speakers are capable of in everyday speech? The play
LP is set on a sugar estate of the Natal North Coast in what
appears to be the late 1960s.13
The province
itself is now known as KwaZulu-Natal.
Its immediate setting is a
bar during a single afternoon, in which the main character, Mothie,
initially reminisces with the barman, Sunny, about the old days, and the
passing of some working-class traditions. He is caught at a turning point
between an older rural world and a more modern, urbanizing one. Tension in
the play follows from Mothie's mostly irreverent attitude towards the
lahnee (“white boss,” in this case the owner of the
bar) and the barman's desire not to provoke the white customers in
the adjacent lounge. The structures of apartheid are thus not too far
removed from the quietude of the Mt. Edgecombe bar room. Tension also
follows from Mothie's own heavy-handedness as a parent, which brings
him into collision with his daughter, who wishes to elope. That the play
was a roaring success when it was staged has more to do with its language
and style than with any intricacies of its plot. Much of its success came
from an audience responding to the novelty of finding representations of
itself and its language on a public stage—a kind of liberation from
semantic repression. The medium was almost the message itself. The
following excerpt is from Act 1 (p. 7), with a gloss into standard
English.
MOTHIE: Arreh, our time, man, our time. Girls can't come
out of the house—so strict they was. Arreh, six o'clock all the
doors will be closed. Can't see one girl with one eyes. That time
boys must dance girls part. Saturday night! Saturday night! Fire all
burning one side. All the pots will be cooking one side.
Thabla, saranji, all getting hot by the fire. Everbody will ask,
Mothie came way? Me! Kisten came way? Your father! Everybody
looking for us to start the wedding joll.
You know these big, big shots from Durban,
Sunnyia—arreh, all will come and sit in one place. Drinking
whisky, brandy, everything man.
Colloquial Standard English:
Hey, our times [were quite something]. The parents
were so strict that girls weren't allowed out of the home.
Y'know, people would shut their doors at 6 o'clock. You
couldn't see a girl at all. At that time boys had to dance the part
of girls [in shows]. Saturday nights [were something
else]. On one side a fire would be burning; and pots of food would be
cooking. The thabla and sarangi [musical instruments] would be
kept warm by the fire. Everybody would ask “Has Mothie
arrived?” That's me … “Has Kisten come?”
That's your father… Everybody would be looking out for us to
start the merry-making.
Y' know, Sunny, even the big shots from Durban would
come to sit and watch. They would be drinking whisky, brandy and
such.
This excerpt draws largely on basilectal speech, emphasizing the norms
of working-class people who evolved a variety of English radically
different in many respects from the more standard varieties of colonial
English spoken by the ruling classes and promulgated in classrooms. It is
of some interest to ascertain exactly how authentic the representation of
language in the play is. I will first comment on this issue broadly,
before providing statistical comparisons with the categories analyzed in
the A&N text. The playwright is sensitive to language
variation of several sorts. Although the main character, Mothie, speaks
mainly basilectal SAIE, his speech shows occasional style shifting, as one
would expect. Thus, he switches to an acrolectal form (more or less
standard) on p. 8:
(19) (Proceeds to table and says loudly) If I want to drink
wine, it's my business.
This is an act of code divergence, in defiance of the newcomer in the
bar, obviously an outsider (of Indian origin) looking “with kindly
amusement” at Mothie's antics. Later (p. 11) Mothie repeats the
same sentence aggressively to the barman:
(20) If I want to drink—my business.
The deletion of the dummy subject it and of the copula verb
is in (20) is more in keeping with basilectal norms, showing a
convergence back to the norms of the bar room. Another piece of variation
involves Mothie's encouraging words to his young son, who is offered
a soft drink by the barman:
(21) Go, uncle giving cold drink, go. (‘Go and receive the cold
drink that the barman is offering you.’)
With the absence of the object pronoun you and the article
a after the main verb giving, this counts as a piece of
downshifting typical of adults speaking to children, signifying a kindly
cajolement. In Mesthrie (2003) I showed how the
basilect and pre-basilect is understood by working-class parents to be an
appropriate variety for addressing children.
Another sociolinguistic point of relevance is that Mothie's
language is basilectal, but does not include much slang.14
Many people wrongly equate nonstandard dialect
grammar and lexis with slang. It is therefore necessary to point out that
the basilect has a grammatical coherence of its own; into which some
speakers (typically young males) may insert slang words.
This is
in contrast to the language of the younger bar man, Sunny, whose
mesolectal speech contains a fair amount of slang. On page 16 of the text,
Sunny uses the following slang items:
ous ‘people, male
persons’;
pulled out ‘left’;
bro
‘brother, chum’,
lighties ‘boys’;
catch it ‘be beaten’;
lahnee ‘rich
man’. Such vocabulary is not used by Mothie, apart from
lightie and
lahnee. These terms are, in fact, on the
borderline between slang and dialect for many South Africans today. The
sociolinguistic nuance conveyed here is that of an old, rural person
lacking the wiles of city-slick males, who use a high degree of slang.
Mothie's speech thus evokes laughter because the audience finds the
use of this private, (lower) class-code in a public setting novel and
incongruous. But the longer he speaks (without slang) the more sympathetic
one feels towards him.
When the boss himself makes an appearance, his language involves a
kind of talking down, in the direction of the mock language associated
with the A&N stereotypes:
(22) Now you going to have one big, big wedding. Don't forget to
bring me some curry and rice…. Hey Mothie have one nother one wine
…. and give those chaps a drink too … (p. 41).
However, neither his language nor his attitude shows undiluted
mockery. There is a gesture of goodwill in the offer of drink and the
request for food from the wedding. Likewise, two of his utterances here
are standard (Don't forget to bring me some curry and rice
and give those chaps a drink too), rather than mock language. His
attempt at joviality here is tinged with slight condescension, conveyed by
a version of SAIE that unwittingly contains several mistakes. First, in
the phrase big, big wedding, reduplication of the adjective
big is used inappropriately with a singular noun. Compare this
with Mothie's earlier utterance (p. 7):
(23) What big, big prayers we'll have.
Mothie's utterance in (23) shows the appropriate context for the
reduplication, before plural nouns.15
This
rule may appear to be violated in two of Mothie's basilectal
sentences: Wedding! Big, big wedding we'll have (p. 7) and
Little, little thing we worry about … (p. 12). It is clear
from the context, that although the nouns appear as singular, they are
semantic plurals: “We used to have (very) big weddings”;
“We worry about (such) small things.”
The second
error in the boss's speech is the phrase
one nother one for
“another”: The SAIE basilect form is
nother one. It
is also noteworthy that the playwright allows the boss a
sociolinguistically realistic repertoire in this exchange: Standard
English on the phone; standard English initially to Mothie to break the
serious news from the police station; followed by an attempt at joviality
involving convergence (with hypercorrective errors as noted, which are in
keeping with Janda & Auger's account of downward
hyperaccommodation).
I now examine the use made by the playwright of the be + ing
construction in the utterances of Mothie. The broader questions, as
already mentioned, are whether a degree of sociolinguistic veracity can be
found in Mothie's use of a specific grammatical construction or
whether even well-intentioned authors fall prey to stereotyping in this
respect. Table 5 compares the statistics for
A&N and pre-bas in Table 4 with
those of LP and the basilect.
A comparison of the proportionate use of nonprogressive Ø +
-ing per verb function in A&N, pre-bas, basilect,
and LPIn this count I excluded
present progressives with future meaning, as in I'm coming just
now, which I place under present; futures with modal + be +
V + -ing (I'll be standing next to you, man) are
excluded.
For three categories (future, modal aux, and imperative) LP
shows zero use of -ing, in keeping with the pre-bas and basilect,
and unlike LP. In a fourth category (infinitives), LP
reflects the zero usage of the basilect, rather than the sporadic use of
pre-bas. The use of Ø + -ing in LP forms thus
closely matches that of my basilectal sample, with one exception: The
playwright eschews Ø + -ing for the simple present and
past. The reason for this is that these are residual forms of the basilect
(more characteristic of the pre-bas, which has overtones of being
“broken”). The proportions for the basilect, as given in Table 5, are in fact 14/206 (6.8%) and 3/417
(0.7%). LP ignored this residue. Instead, the LP text
favored a more sophisticated use of Ø + -ing for past
habitual irrealis progressives (cf., everybody looking for us for
“everybody would be looking for us” in the LP passage
cited earlier).
Figure 3 presents the information given in
Table 5 graphically. Figure
3 confirms that LP and A&N are mirror
opposites for the nonprogressive Ø + -ing forms.
A&N blows up the small number of such forms from pre-bas and
basilect into a categorical presence. LP, on the other hand,
ignores this small number of forms in favor of categorical absence. Hence,
LP does not show up in the graph for Figure
3 at all. However, LP does not ignore dialect use of
be + -ing. This is reflected in Table
6, which shows the proportion of progressive -ing forms
without be to the number of -ing forms with
be.
Percentage of forms with nonprogressive -ing per tense
category in Applesammy and Naidoo, The Lahnee's
Pleasure, the basilect, and pre-basilect.
Proportion of progressive Ø + -ing verb forms to total
number of progressive verb forms with be + -ing or Ø +
-ing in two texts and two lects
Table 6 shows how close Mothie's norms
are to the basilect for progressives, rather than to pre-bas and
A&N. This is a socially authentic portrayal of someone with
minimal education, with community-based social networks, and little or no
social contact with L1 English speakers. Tables 5 and 6 thus show that a
native-speaker playwright with “realist” intentions can
replicate a community's nonstandard norms with a high degree of
accuracy. This includes representing the community's variable rules
(in this case, for the use of the two types of -ing), as well as
showing the effects of “audience design” (Bell, 1984), as Mothie style-shifts in accommodation
to different speakers. The “interests of the text” are less
evident in Mothie's speech, apart from his use of occasional past
habitual used to rather than should. Here, it is
possible that the playwright was constrained by the difficulties that
should might pose to a wider audience. SAIE is the only dialect
of English world-wide to use should (variably, but quite
commonly) for the past habitual “used to.” There is another
sense in which the interests of the text are invoked, that is, in the play
as a whole. There is a necessary contrast between the standard speech of
the Indian stranger returning from England, and the basilectal norms of
the main character. The standard speech acts as something of a
counterpoint to Mothie's language. Some standard speech is necessary
to keep a sense of balance in order to make this a creative work with a
reasonably broad appeal, and not simply a dialect tract. The standard
speech also reminds the audience that not all Indians are basilectal. That
is, LP avoids the social overgeneralization evident in
A&N.
TRANSCENDING DIALECT REALISM—THE
WEDDING
I now turn briefly to the final text, The Wedding (henceforth
TW), a novel by Imraan Coovadia, also a member of the SAIE speech
community. The novel's plot is simple: It deals with the chance
meeting of a city man and a village woman in India, their hurried wedding
(against the woman's wishes) and their eventual journey to a new life
in South Africa. More anti-romance than romance, this tale is told in an
effusive style, described on the front cover blurb by 2003 Nobel laureate,
J. M. Coetzee as “prose of dazzling comic wizardry.” Much of
the novel is in the form of dialogue and the free indirect style of the
characters. An authorial voice using standard English is rather less
evident. There is one way that this text differs from A&N and
LP: The English is not meant to represent English as such (though
the author is silent about this). Rather, it is intended as a
representation of the L1 of the characters (either Marathi, Gujarati, or
the Meman dialect of Sindhi). The following excerpt deals with the
attempts by a poor and miserly father-in-law to get his new son-in-law to
accept two train tickets to Hyderabad as a wedding gift. This show of
generosity is mitigated by the fact that he did not have to pay for the
tickets, and that Hyderabad—an unlikely honeymoon spot—is in
the wrong direction from the newlyweds destination, Bombay. In the
following extract, Yusuf is the father-in-law and Ismet is the son-in-law
besotted with his new village-girl wife, Khateja, who does not reciprocate
such feelings in the slightest.
“Hyderabad! But that is located in the opposite
direction!” “Oh,” Yusuf said smoothly, “but that
is precisely the point. Leisure time. When you get to Hyderabad all you
must do is buy a ticket and lo! You will arrive in Bombay quick-snaps. You
will say, ‘My good father Yusuf, he was absolutely correct. In fact,
my holiday was too-too short. A fleeting thing. Pity we didn't get a
chance to see more of Hyderabad, it is one of our oldest and most
interesting Indian cities.’ I give you my personal
guarantee.”
Then he quieted his voice and said confidentially,
“Besides, it is Khateja who is wanting this thing, you see.
Always wanted to see Hyderabad even as a small kitten. “Daddy take
me to Hyderabad, Daddy take me to Hyderabad. Daddy can we pay a visit to
this Hyderabad for a few days tourism? Don't know why exactly, just
always had a thing about it.”
Ismet grimaced. He thought of it as a grimy, enfeebled,
hillset city, sun-cudgeled, raisin-peopled, camel-walked,
rain-drained.
“Oh, oh, wonderful city, wonderful city. Never been
there myself but heard only the best about it. Best reports. Brother
Yacoob, your uncle Yacoob, saw it on one occasion many years back. Never
got over it. Never got over it, it is the most amazing thing. Still to
this day he is always talking about it, always has a
good word for it, Hyderabad has this, Hyderabad has that, in Hyderabad
they know what is two and two, and so on. He'll be too happy when he
hears you've gone. Always been crazy about Hyderabad. Where Khateja
got the idea, I suppose.”
Dialect uses of -ing in TW are woven into a wider
fabric of poetic language. The effect of such transformation of dialect
into “poetic diction” is not to stereotype (as in
A&N) or to be a faithful representation of a particular
dialect (as in LP), but to transcend the particular. In this
regard, the most noteworthy feature is the absence of bare -ing
forms. Whenever -ing occurs in TW, it is accompanied by
some form of be. Examples of -ing in the TW
text are therefore entirely of an aspectual nature, capturing the
well-known Indian English predilection for extension of progressive
-ing to habitual and stative contexts (Trudgill & Hannah, 1985:110). Some examples of
be + -ing in stative contexts are given next (all citations are
taken from TW, chapt. 3):
(24) And he is still wishing to marry me.
(25) We are wanting you to look your best.
(26) You are looking so handsome.
It is also noticeable that Coovadia exploited the ambiguity in some
be + -ing forms, where the construction can be taken as
nonstandard or just about acceptable as colloquial standard. However,
because from the viewpoint of formal standard English these do not take
be + -ing in the sense intended, they are counted as habituals
(27–28) or stative (29), rather than as progressives in Table 7.
(27) She is always talking about it.
(28) That's what they are saying.
(29) I'm looking forward to meeting it.
As Table 7 shows, the use of be +
-ing is outnumbered by the use of simple past and present forms.
TW has no instances of be + -ing for future,
simple past, perfective, or habitual past. It does, however, occasionally
use be + -ing after imperatives (30–31) and modals (32),
with special effect:
(30) Better be kissing that chicken goodbye.
(31) Do not be forgetting us, eh.
(32) Can't be squandering the minutes…
The effect of sentences (24) to (32) is to stylize the Indianness of
the thought processes, going back to the Marathi/Gujarati/Sindhi
of the speakers, rather than to stigmatize incompetent English via bare
-ing forms. This effect is strengthened by having the vast
majority of these forms used variably with the standard form
predominating, as shown in Table 7.
Use of nonstandard be + -ing versus standard forms of verbs
in The Wedding (chap. 3)
Standard present progressives (n = 5) and past progressives
(n = 2) with be + -ing in TW are excluded from
Table 7, but are included in Table 8, which gives a comparison of the proportion of
be + -ing progressives to all progressives in the varieties
studied in this article.
Use of be + -ing progressives in three texts and two
lects
Table 8 shows a continuum in the use of
be + -ing in all five varieties studied. A&N, which
draws on and exaggerates pre-bas norms, steadfastly refuses to bestow any
tokens of the standard variant on the speech of its main characters. At
the other end, TW joyously acknowledges the use of be +
-ing with all progressives (Table 8) and
with some habituals/statives, as well (Table
7), in keeping with the norms of Indian English and SAIE.
Intermediate figures occur in pre-bas, basilect, and LP,
reflecting an interplay between bare -ing forms and be
+-ing forms for the progressive. This situation is reflected in
Figures 4A and 4B,
which draw on Tables 5 and 6. These figures summarize the use of Ø +
-ing in progressive use and nonprogressive use, respectively, in all
the varieties studied in this article.
Percentage of past and present progressive Ø + ing
verb forms to total number of progressives in three texts and two
lects.
Percentage of past and present nonprogressive Ø + ing
verb forms to total number of verb forms in three texts and two
lects.
CONCLUSION
By using actual speech data conducted under sociolinguistic conditions
associated with the “Labovian interview” as a baseline, it is
possible to assess the kinds of choices made by authors with different
aims. In this article, I demonstrate the gross stereotyping effects of
mock language or parody, showing how principles of variation are
systematically violated in A&N. The six principles that
emerge are the following:
(a) A few variables are used to create a gross
stereotype.
(b) Each such variable is presented as if it is
linguistically invariant in the dialect being stereotyped, as a
nonstandard form (quantitative overgeneralization).
(c) The variable is overgeneralized to neighboring (phonetic
or grammatical) contexts in which it does not occur in the dialect being
stereotyped (qualitative overgeneralization).
(d) The variable is overgeneralized to cover the entire
speech community (with a few possible exceptions) being stereotyped
(social overgeneralization).
(e) The variable is overgeneralized to cover all contexts of
use, and thus to undo the effects of “audience design”
(stylistic overgeneralization).
(f) The variable(s) may be embedded among other standard
grammatical features (in contrast to the community's actual norms) in
the interests of intelligibility to the intended audience.
I also confirm that a text written by a writer with
“insider” status may (unconsciously) replicate the principles
of variation rather well, in the interests of realism (see also
Yaeger-Dror et al. 2002; Fonollosa, 1995). Finally, for contrastive purposes, I
focussed on a post-modern, comic presentation that draws on dialect
features and shows awareness of the variability of dialect grammar. At the
same time, it transforms that grammar greatly, ending up with poetic
language that transcends the nonstandard–standard divide. It also
eschews the monostylism promulgated by the stereotyping text.
