From Linguistic Apartheid to Linguistic Co-habitation

Apartheid South Africa instituted laws that divided not only the communities but also the languages they spoke. Phenomena such as codeswitching (CS) were an anathema for the apartheid state. Now that apartheid is dead, it is perhaps opportune to explore to what extent the political change from apartheid to democracy has permeated South Africa's other institutions, including language. This article investigates the use of CS in print advertising in the post-apartheid South Africa, with a focus on Zulu English CS. In particular, the article seeks to address the following questions: Why do the marketers in South Africa use CS in advertising? What are the syntactic patterns of their CS behaviour? Are these patterns random or rule-governed? Does their use of CS in the advertisements follow a certain order or hierarchy, such that if English occurs in one part of the advertisement it then spreads to the other parts as well, as suggested in Bhatia's (2001) Structural Domain Dependency (SDD) model?