difference between south africa townships and homelands

This paper will discuss some findings from a SANPAD and South African National Research Foundation funded project on migration and language change. In the Western Cape, this has been characterised by migration from the old rural ‘homelands’ of the Eastern Cape to townships on the Cape Flats, a large, mainly residential area to the east of the city. 'Since the end of apartheid removed restrictions on the movement of people, there have been increased numbers of internal economic migrants flooding into South Africa’s urban centres. We argue that current terminology used for varieties of this sort is inadequate to describe the combination of performance, lexicon and style associated with tsotsitaals. It considers perceptions of the style associated with tsotsitaals from the viewpoint of both speakers and listeners in a township community in Cape Town. The research draws on fieldwork conducted in Cape Town in 2006–2007 to expand our understanding of tsotsitaals. This article uses Coupland's (2007) description of style to understand how tsotsitaals can be viewed as discursive practices performed to achieve social meaning. Tsotsitaals draw on extra-linguistic modes of identity performance such as body language, clothing, and other facets of what could commonly be called ‘style’. These descriptions however, fail to acknowledge the centrality of performance to these phenomena.

The collection of South African urban language phenomena called Tsotsitaal, Scamtho, Ringas (in short ‘Tsotsitaals’) etc, have been described differently as code-switching, mixed languages, or essentially slang vocabulary.

Difference between south africa townships and homelands