Introduction
A growing field in sociolinguistics in Southern Africa, and the African continent more broadly, is the investigation into forms of language used by youth, particularly those residing in the multilingual cities of the continent. Examples of these phenomena include Sheng from Kenya, Camfranglais from Cameroon, Nouchi from Ivory Coast and Tsotsitaal from South Africa. Tsotsitaal is known by a number of alternative names, depending on the geographic region, speaker preference and local practice. Some alternative names include flaaitaal, iscamtho, ringas, isiTsotsi and kasitaal (Makalela 2013; Mesthrie & Hurst 2013; Rudwick 2005). It is known as Setsotsi in the North West province (henceforth North West) because the noun class [se-] in Sotho1 languages denotes a language (e.g. Sejapane for Se-Japanese, Sekorea for Se-Korean and Setsotsi for Se-Tsotsi). Tsotsitaal has received great attention in academic literature, and its features, including its linguistic structure, history and functions, have been dealt with in details in other publications (cf. Brookes 2014; Hurst 2009, 2015; Mesthrie 2008; Molamu 2003; Ntshangase 1993).
Tsotsitaal, according to a number of recent authors, should not be described as a language, but instead as a style or register. Mesthrie and Hurst (2013:125) describe it as ‘essentially a highly stylised slang register of an urban form of language, expressing male youth culture within the broader matrix of an urban identity’.2 According to Hurst and Mesthrie (2013:5), it first emerged in the mixed townships of Johannesburg, such as Sophiatown, in the 1940s, and subsequently spread to other parts of South Africa. Slabbert and Myers-Scotton (1997:322) state that it functions as the lingua franca of male social interactions, and Hurst (2009:250) notes that these are primarily young black South African males who live in urban townships. Calteaux (1996:59–60) also notes that tsotsitaal is mostly used by men; although women sometimes use it and usually understand what is being said, it is claimed that only certain types of women use it – those of low repute or those who work in ‘shebeens’. However, a number of famous South African women during the Sophiatown era, such as Dolly Rathebe, spoke tsotsitaal, and many women today employ tsotsitaal freely in particular contexts and often create their own terms (cf. Maribe & Brookes 2014).
With regard to the domains of use, Calteaux (1996:60) submits that tsotsitaal is used in informal situations such as ‘shebeens’ and ‘stokvels’, in the street, at social gatherings, at soccer matches, in shops, on public transport, etc. Brookes and Lekgoro (2014:149) attest that informal male youth varieties have long been a prominent feature in townships across South Africa, and that they relate to the transitional life stage between childhood and adulthood of young men of African descent, during which time many young men in South Africa’s townships participate in peer groups that are part of male youth social networks on the township streets. It should be noted, however, that tsotsitaal is also spoken by older men within peer groups; therefore, whilst ‘youth’ may innovate tsotsitaal, older people continue to employ it.
Molamu (2003:xxi, xiii) argues that the phenomenon developed for several intertwined reasons: it was born as an expression of creativity and passion, as well as an expression of the sadness, anger and resentment felt by these people dislocated from their sense of identity, and it acted as a bridge amongst young segregated communities that spoke several distinct languages. Ntshangase (1993) remarks that tsotsitaal represents urbanism, slickness, progressiveness, streetwiseness and modernity. Calteaux (1996:61) notes that whilst tsotsitaal may be socially stigmatised as ‘bad isiZulu’ or ‘bad Sesotho’, it has covert prestige amongst its speakers; however, tsotsitaal is not used as a language of education or communication in formal domains or institutions.
In terms of its linguistic structure, Hurst and Mesthrie (2013:3) note that tsotsitaal is a linguistic phenomenon common to many South African urban townships, which is constituted primarily by lexical variation with anti-language intentions (cf. Halliday 1975).
Slabbert and Myers-Scotton (1997) argued the following:
Tsotsitaal is constituted as a code-switching variety, with a non-standard dialect of Afrikaans as Matrix Language (ML). Afrikaans therefore supplies the morphosyntactic frame of mixed constituents. Into these frames, content elements from other languages (called Embedded Language [EL]) are inserted, as well as some novel words with no known origins. Although there may be a good deal of diversity in the content elements of tsotsitaal (which may come from either the ML or ELs), tsotsitaal is thus very uniform in how it is structured from the morphosyntactic point of view. (Calteaux 1996:57)
However, many authors have challenged the conceptualisation of tsotsitaal as a code-switching variety. As Mesthrie and Hurst (2013:126) argue, the syntactic structure of tsotsitaals is derivative, ‘being identical to that of either an existing non-standard variety, or to patterns of syntactic switching already existing in the speech communities’. Furthermore, they suggest that the semantic manipulation and shift that constitute a primary feature of the tsotsitaal lexicon disqualify lexical borrowings from being seen as code-switching. In addition, the evidence that tsotsitaal uses Afrikaans as its base language has been contradicted by many studies showing that, whilst the earliest instantiation of tsotsitaal from Sophiatown did indeed have an Afrikaans syntactic base, tsotsitaal as a register can be inserted into whatever is the available local language (e.g. isiZulu as seen in Rudwick 2005; isiXhosa as seen in Hurst 2008 and Mesthrie & Hurst 2013; Sesotho sa Leboa as seen in Nkosi 2008 and so on) and that it relies on the most urban form, as explained by Mesthrie and Hurst (2013:125–126):
The real restructuring is at the level of the matrix, urban vernaculars of the wider communities. The base of a tsotsitaal itself is not a standard variety, but always a partially restructured urban one, often having the most deviant syntax on this continuum, that young speakers can come up with.
Research on tsotsitaal suggests that Afrikaans is the first matrix language (ML) of tsotsitaal, and there was a shift to two new MLs, namely, isiZulu and Sesotho in the 1950s and the 1960s when the government split communities according to race under the Group Areas Act (No. 41 of 1950), as Brookes (2014) describes in her ethnographic study of tsotsitaal in Vosloorus, near Johannesburg. As a result of forced removals, generations of people who were born in the Johannesburg suburb of Sophiatown (before they were relocated to black townships, such as Soweto) spoke an Afrikaans-based tsotsitaal, whilst their offspring who were born in black townships spoke either an urban isiZulu-based tsotsitaal (in Soweto’s historically Nguni sections, such as Zola and Dhlamini) or an urban Sesotho-based tsotsitaal (in Soweto’s historically Sotho sections, such as Meadowlands and Dobsonville).
Following a better understanding of its linguistic structure and the reliance on speakers’ vernacular languages for its grammatical base, tsotsitaal more recently has been characterised not as a language but as a register, or style, of speaking. Hurst and Mesthrie (2013) proposed the term ‘stylect’ to refer to tsotsitaal and similar phenomena present in other urban centres (such as Sheng in Nairobi, etc.). The term ‘stylect’ is intended to incorporate non-linguistic aspects of the tsotsitaal style, which include gesture, clothing, music and lifestyle choices (Hurst & Mesthrie 2013), and also to highlight the use of particular lexical items as part of a style performance in the construction of youth identity. As such, tsotsitaal is primarily characterised by re-lexicalisation and metaphor in the lexicon (Hurst 2016).
Although recent work has begun to compare geographical examples of tsotsitaal to identify, for example, a common core lexicon for tsotsitaal at a national level (such as Hurst’s 2015 description of the commonalities and differences between tsotsitaals based on different languages in her comparison of a number of examples of tsotsitaal in the literature), and common linguistic structures and gestural features (Hurst & Buthelezi 2014), more work is required in this area. In particular, whilst studies of tsotsitaal in a number of different base languages have been undertaken, no in-depth research on the Setswana-based tsotsitaal is currently available (apart from the study by Cook (2009), ‘Street Setswana vs. School Setswana’, which includes some tsotsitaal items, but does not specifically focus on this register). Furthermore, since Calteaux’s (1996) work in Tembisa, no study has focused on differences in tsotsitaal varieties on a provincial scale. Such an analysis is able to tell us more about the spread of lexical items at a national level, and how terms become innovated at a local level.
Recent work by Hurst (2016) has examined the use of metaphor in tsotsitaal, and shown how discourse at a sentence or turn-level can lead to new coinages. However, the process of coinage of new lexical items in tsotsitaal has not yet been examined in detail. This article argues that new lexical innovations at a local level are often drawn from the local base language, in this case Setswana, because the local language offers the best opportunities for semantic shift and multiple meanings.
Methodology
In the tradition of a linguistic anthropology, there are various methods that could be used to gather data, including interviews and participant observation which were used in this study. According to Jackson (1995:17), participant observation is one of the methods that qualitative researchers use to understand how the respondents experience and explain their own world. Delamont (2004:218) adds that, ‘Participant-observation means spending long periods watching people, coupled with talking to them about what they are doing, thinking and saying, designed to see how they understand their world’.
To gather data, the first author visited popular entertainment areas and mingled with the local people with a view to identify potential respondents, that is, people whose utterances were dominated by tsotsitaal.
With regard to what constitutes tsotsitaal, it was relatively easy for the first author to separate those who predominantly spoke colloquial Setswana from those who spoke tsotsitaal because he not only grew up speaking Setswana-based tsotsitaal but also studied Setswana academically and published literature in the language. In addition, he is a Setswana dialectologist (i.e. specialises in Setswana dialects), and has published work on Sepitori (or Pretoria Sotho) – a mixed language spoken by black residents of greater Pretoria (or Tshwane) as a lingua franca; this mixed language’s substrate and superstrate are Setswana and Sesotho sa Leboa, respectively.
Setswana-based tsotsitaal-speaking male3 respondents aged 18–60 were interviewed at areas located just outside the North West’s three biggest cities in terms of population and economy. The cities are Rustenburg, Klerksdorp and Potchefstroom. To be more specific, Rustenburg data were gathered at Tlhabane township and Geelhoutpark suburb (recording time: 61 min); Klerksdorp data were gathered at Jouberton township (recording time: 25 min); and Potchefstroom data were gathered at Ikageng township (recording time: 40 min). Rustenburg is located about 140 km north-west of Johannesburg in the Bojanala Platinum District Municipality, whilst Klerksdorp and Potchefstroom are located about 170 km and 120 km, respectively, south-west of Johannesburg in the Dr Kenneth Kaunda District Municipality.
Data analysis
This article will present data as follows:
an example that shows the structural features of Setswana-based tsotsitaal
‘new’ tsotsitaal terms, and their semantics (‘new’ in this context refers to terms which may or may not be widely used or known to an average tsotsitaal speaker outside where they are used, but more significantly had not been captured in the known literature4).
Conclusion
This study shows that the tsotsitaal spoken in the North West uses Setswana as its ML, and this is consistent with Brook’s findings, who submits the following:
The individuals who responded to my search for tsotsitaal speakers had mother tongues including isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Setswana and English. What I discovered was that these native speakers all spoke a different version of tsotsitaal that appeared to depend on the speaker’s native language, while incorporating lexicon from Afrikaans as well as isiZulu and isiXhosa, and, to lesser degrees, Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi, Tshivenda and Xitsonga. (2010:2)
Brook’s (2010) respondents incorporated lexicon from languages which had vitality in areas where data were gathered. Consistent with this finding was that, in Klerksdorp and Potchefstroom, pockets of Sesotho lexicon made it into the Setswana dialects (and by default the tsotsitaal versions), a phenomenon which was not picked up in Rustenburg’s Setswana dialect because of the city’s much lower population of speakers of other Bantu languages.
Respondents used many widely used terms such as medi, ringa, authi, majita, vaya, tiger, klipper and spana. This confirms the findings of previous studies which noted that tsotsitaal is a dynamic language, and its terms travel from its epicentre to other regions; yet, although speakers used many terms which, according to previous studies, were coined in Gauteng (particularly Johannesburg), they also used new or local coinages. These coinages were often developed from Setswana – the local language – using sematic shift and metaphor, and some exhibited multiple meanings as in the case of pakistan. Items with multiple meanings, and therefore wider salience, seem more likely to be adopted outside the language community and thus make it into the ‘national’ tsotsitaal lexicon, although terms may also be popularised through routes such as popular music and television. There is some suggestion that words derived from English and Afrikaans are more likely to make it into the national lexicon as many South Africans speak these languages as an additional language. Therefore, their (metaphorical) meaning is accessible to a wider proportion of South Africans than words developed from languages that do not have a national footprint. However, these findings are tentative, and more research needs to be conducted on the phenomenon.
The authors found that each city believed that its tsotsitaal version was the most sophisticated as one respondent from Rustenburg submitted, ‘Rusty e thôpa di-kasi tse baie ka language ya se-cleva’ (Rustenburg outperforms many townships when it comes to township lingos.). More interestingly, respondents suggested that the tsotsitaal versions spoken in the other cities in the North West were heavily influenced by standard Setswana, and that made such versions less sophisticated. In other words, they believed that the strong influence of standard Setswana depicts less sophistication. One respondent in Klerksdorp remarked, ‘If you want pure Setswana, you should go to Rustenburg, Mafikeng or Potchefstroom; here we speak mixed languages.’ Be that as it may, the authors observed that the Setswana dialect spoken in each city was the ML for the tsotsitaal versions spoken; thus, the suggestion about the strong influence of standard Setswana elsewhere was just a perception. The data also confirmed the idea that the most urban or colloquial form of the local language is used as the base language of tsotsitaals.