South African English, Cultural Conceptualizations in

This entry discusses the interplay between language, culture, and conceptualization in South African English, with a main focus on Black South African English as the most widely‐spoken variety. The discussion focuses on central findings from a number of cognitive‐cultural (socio)linguistic studies of English in South Africa. It stresses the central conceptual role played by the sub‐Saharan model of community and argues that cultural conceptualizations in (Black) South African English are comprehensive, purposeful, and conventional. The entry illustrates how language‐culture interaction may not only influence patterns of language use on the lexical level but how it may affect morphosyntactical and structural‐discursive properties of nativized text‐types produced within a certain cultural setting. Finally, it discusses language‐body conceptualizations that are both specifically South African and universally shared with multilingual settings in the world.