Friday, September 12, 2014

Some updates on tsotsitaal research

Well it's been quite some time (I don't know how some academics manage to blog regularly and hold down their teaching & research duties as well!) and I came back to my blog and found there have been lots of hits on some of my posts, particularly the reference list and the lexical items list.. I'll try to post some more soon.

Some new developments in tsotsitaal research:

I had a second publication out last year: 'When you hang out with the guys they keep you in style': the case for considering style in descriptions of South Africa tsotsitaals. My co-author is Raj Mesthrie, and it's published in Language Matters.

Secondly, I've been editing a special issue on tsotsitaals for the journal Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies (SALALS). It should come out in the next month or so (Issue 3 2014), the manuscript has gone through to the publishers, so keep a look out for that one - I'm very excited about the publication! The contents list is as follows: 

Preface
Ellen Hurst

Articles
1) A social history of urban male youth varieties in Stirtonville and Vosloorus, South Africa
Heather Brookes and Tshepiso Lekgoro

2) The grammatical structure of Sowetan tsotsitaal
Hilde Gunnink

3) English tsotsitaals? - an analysis of two written texts in Surfspeak and South African Indian English slang
Rajend Mesthrie


4) A visual and linguistic comparison of features of Durban and Cape Town tsotsitaal
Ellen Hurst and Mthuli Buthelezi

5) Male youth talk in the construction of black lesbian identities
Tebogo Maribe and Heather Brookes

6) Why not use Sepitori to enrich the vocabularies of Setswana and Sepedi?
Thabo Ditsele

7) Language and youth identity in a multilingual setting: A multimodal repertoire approach
Anthea Bristowe, Marcelyn Oostendorp and Christine Anthonissen

8) Urban language research in South Africa: achievements and challenges
Klaus Beyer

Finally, we've just announced the second international conference on African Urban Youth Language, which will be taking place in Nairobi, in Kenya, at the end of next year. You can find the website here and there will be updates as we get closer to the time about keynote speakers, workshops and so on.

Ellen