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South Africa's unique social and political history has generated a rich variety of literatures, with themes spanning pre-colonial life, the days of apartheid, and the lives of people in the "new South Africa". Many of the first black South African print authors were missionary-educated, and many wrote in either English or Afrikaans.
This article covers the phonological system of South African English (SAE) as spoken primarily by White South Africans. While there is some variation among speakers, SAE typically has a number of features in common with English as it is spoken in southern England (in places like London), such as non-rhoticity and the TRAP – BATH split .
The Africa Alphabet (also International African Alphabet or IAI alphabet) is a set of letters designed as the basis for Latin alphabets for the languages of Africa.It was initially developed in 1928 by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures from a combination of the English alphabet and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
Map of South Africa showing the primary Xhosa language speech area in green. Xhosa is an agglutinative tonal language categorized under Bantu linguistic classification. While the Xhosas call their language "isiXhosa", it is usually referred to as "Xhosa" in English. Written Xhosa uses a Latin alphabet–based system.
Since then, continent-wide harmonization has been largely abandoned, because regional needs, practices and thus preferences differ greatly across Africa. [1] Through the individual languages that were its basis, the African Reference Alphabet inherits from the Africa Alphabet, and like the latter uses a number of IPA letters.
[51] [52] [53] The uvular fricative is also used by many speakers of white South African English as a realisation of the marginal English phoneme /x/. [53] In Afrikaans, velar [ x ] may be used in a few "hyper-posh" varieties [ which? ] , and it may also, rarely, occur as an allophone before front vowels in speakers with otherwise uvular [ χ ] .
According to the Central Statistical Services, as of 1994, about seven million black people spoke English in South Africa. BSAE originated in the South African school system when the 1953 Bantu Education Act mandated the use of native African languages in the classroom. When this law was established, most of the native English-speaking teachers ...
The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet. [note 7] For this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ʔ , originally had the form of a question mark with the dot removed.