The impressionistic literature on South African English (SAfE) displays disagreement with respect to the phonetic quality of /l/ in this dialect, or, more particularly, in relation to the quality of the allophones of this... [ view full abstract ]
The impressionistic literature on South African English (SAfE) displays disagreement with respect to the phonetic quality of /l/ in this dialect, or, more particularly, in relation to the quality of the allophones of this phoneme in onset and coda position. Lass (1990; 1995; 2004), in particular, makes the claim that SAfE displays a typically ‘Southern’ clear-dark /l/ allophony, with neutral to palatalized (i.e. generally clear) /l/ in onset position, but dark /l/ (anything from velarised to pharyngealized) in coda position. This position has become the standard one, echoed, for example, in Bowerman (2004).
This is, however, in contrast to almost all previous pronouncements on the matter. Thus Lanham (1967: 65; 98) concludes that /l/ in SAfE is clear in all positions, with Wells (1982: 617) agreeing i.e. that “South African English is not really dark in any environment” but always clear or neutral. Even the recent Trudgill (2004: 79) adopts the same position.
The research on which this paper is based attempts to clarify the above-mentioned discrepancy i.e. to determine what the status of SAfE /l/ is on the basis of a large sample of recordings as well as modern acoustic phonetic techniques; but also to discover what the source of the discrepancy might be (barring simple error). In this regard, it investigates the possibility that SAfE might have undergone sound change with respect to /l/. It does this by drawing on a sample of 50 GenSAfE speakers from Cape Town, ranging from 18 to 80 years of age, almost evenly split for gender. Each participant was recorded taking part in a sociolinguistic interview, subsequently prepared for analysis using the Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction suite (Rosenfelder, Fruehwald, Evanini & Yuan 2011).
