Black South African English on the radio

ABSTRACT For most rural communities in South Africa, community radio remains the most common mass communication channel which models English speech forms and functions. Whereas print media has received some attention in the earlier works on Black South African English (BSAE) research, the speech tokens used in the radio have not been empirically studied to date. In order to fill this gap and expand previous work on the variety, this study investigated high‐frequency features of BSAE drawn from a corpus of 209,000 words from a rural English‐medium community radio in Limpopo Province. Normalized frequency rates of syntactic, discourse and pragmatic features were calculated, using corpus quantification procedures, which were complemented by a cross‐linguistic analysis of the selected features with an upper limit of 10,000 words. The findings of the study provide evidence that BSAE has evolved alongside the nativization and endonormative phases proposed in Schneider's Dynamic Model and that both the radio usage and reliance on the logic of Bantu language substrate forms, in combination, reinforce its stabilization. Implications for future research directions are offered at the end of the paper.