Sociolinguistic aspects of siSwati‐English bilingualism

ABSTRACT: This paper is a pilot study of bilingualism in siSwati and English in Swaziland. Swaziland has been the site of contact between siSwati and English since long before it became a British colony in 1903. As a result, there has naturally been a great deal of what Haugen (1972) has termed ‘interlingual contagion’ in both directions. The study describes some aspects of this interlingual contagion, with a focus on borrowing and code‐switching on the one hand, and on the derivatives of these phenomena ‐the ‘Englishization’(Kachru, 1983) of siSwati and the ‘Swazification’ of English ‐on the other. These phenomena and their derivatives are examined via a model of bilingualism which presumes that they all carry indexical meanings both on the societal and individual levels.