Towards a corpus of South African english: corralling the sub-varieties

Abstract

Within the last twenty years, the use of a corpus for language research has become the sine qua non in many areas of linguistic enquiry. This trend is particularly evident in lexicogra-phy, a discipline which has become increasingly and overtly 'corpus-driven'. This article draws on research from a Master's project which involved the collection of a small corpus of Indian South African English (ISAE), an acknowledged component or sub-variety of South African English (SAE). The discussion highlights the importance of aiming for a balanced representation of the known sub-varieties of a language when compiling corpora for lexicographic and linguistic inves-tigation. Since ISAE is primarily an oral dialect, specific focus is given to the methodological chal-lenges involved in compiling a spoken corpus. Methodological insights from local as well as inter-national corpus research were used to guide and inform the process. These include the Xhosa Eng-lish Corpus, the New Zealand Corpus of Spoken English and the Hong Kong Corpus of Conversa-tional English. The various stages in the research process are described, together with explanations of how problems such as ways of corpus design, the selection of corpus contributors, the data-col-lection process and developing guidelines for consistency during the corpus compilation were addressed. The article provides a keyhole view of the main lexical and syntactic features of ISAE exemplified in the corpus and juxtaposes these against the backdrop of general SAE and trends in World English. The article concludes with a proposal for the collection of parallel corpora of other sub-varieties of SAE which will provide an objectively compiled repository of language in use to enable researchers to discern the linguistic features at the core and periphery of SAE. It is argued that the establishment of corpora of the various known sub-varieties of SAE could constitute an important step towards the creation of a truly representative large corpus of SAE and ultimately towards a better definition and understanding of SAE.

Keywords: corpus, spoken corpus, design, south african english, sub-varieties, indian south african english, lexicography