South African Coconuts

Under Apartheid, South Africa had quite a rigid social division based on race: Whites, Blacks, Coloureds, Indians. There was little mixing between them. There were also four easily identifiable social dialects of English corresponding to these classes. After the end of Apartheid, from the 1990s onwards, young children of all backgrounds could join high-quality schools once reserved for the Whites – provided their parents could afford it. Initially, white children dominated in these schools. Social networks developed which favoured the English of this class, and children of the other classes accommodated to these prestige norms. As a result, certain features were “deracialised”. The GOOSE vowel, for instance, the vowel of food, who, true, etc., is traditionally fronted in White South African English, a feature that was first described in the 1920s. The vowel is fronted to different degrees. One can describe fronting in this way: the higher the social position and the younger the speaker, the fronter the vowel. In an experiment involving young, middle-class students it was shown that the Black children had almost entirely accommodated their White mates as far as fronting is concerned. This can be interpreted favourably: the linguistic feature has become de-racialised, young Blacks were confidently using the prestige accent of most educated people, a new middle-class was emerging in which race was no longer a barrier to friendship and social relations. However, it also introduced new divisions where there had not been any: division between children who had made it to these schools and their parents and divisions between Blacks who had made it to these schools and those who had not. Apartheid (and Black solidarity) gave way to a sense of differentiation between “authentically” Black or not, ultimately encapsulated in the term coconut: dark on the outside, white on the inside. (Mesthrie, Rajend: “Social change and changing accents in South Africa, in:  Seargeant, Philip & Swann, Joan (ed.): English in the World. History, Diversity, Change. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012: 316-22)