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Gender and usage patterns of English in South African urban and rural contexts
Author(s) -
Kadt Elizabeth de
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
world englishes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.6
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-971X
pISSN - 0883-2919
DOI - 10.1111/1467-971x.00233
Subject(s) - zulu , world englishes , sociology , gender studies , language and gender , colonialism , varieties of english , linguistics , focus (optics) , diversity (politics) , neuroscience of multilingualism , gender bias , psychology , geography , social psychology , anthropology , philosophy , physics , archaeology , optics
Relatively little attention has been paid to gender issues in the investigation of world Englishes, in spite of their common focus, over the past twenty years, on the analysis of (hidden) ways in which power is exercised in society. Recent studies in gender and language have begun to reveal ways in which gender contributes to linguistic pluralism and diversity in post‐colonial societies. This paper draws on studies of gender and bilingualism by Gal (1978, 1979) and Burton et al. (1994), to investigate ways in which acquisition and usage patterns of English as an additional language in KwaZulu‐Natal, South Africa, may be gendered. It extends work done for a Masters thesis (Appalraju, 1999), which first recognised and explored the gendered nature of English acquisition and usage patterns of school pupils from a rural environment. These data are contrasted with English usage patterns of Zulu‐speaking pupils at an urban school. The two sets of results are interpreted in terms of the construction of gender identities, to explore ways in which gender identities may be changing in modernising contexts, and to reveal gender as one hitherto neglected factor which is impacting on the current spread of English as an additional language.