Namibian English in Its Multilingual Environment

Already much discussed within the World Englishes research paradigm, English in Namibia only began to develop into a dominant lingua franca from 1990 onwards. The study’s central research questions are: How does spoken English vary in Namibia? Does it form one variety or several? And what is distinctly Namibian about it? To answer these questions, this study draws on perceptually contextualized speech data collected among young urban Namibian generations. It first identifies the historical and contemporary uses of English in Namibia in comparison with other languages. The patterns of code-switching into which Namibian English is embedded are illustrated based on a corpus of informal multilingual Namibian speech. The study then zooms in on its phonetic and grammatical features, with particular emphasis on how these features are perceived and socially distributed, and whether they represent transfers from native languages or imports from exogenous English varieties.

Gerald Stell, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong.