Lockdown language : online communication in South Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Linguistic studies on South African Englishes and the multilingual repertoires of local citizens have been growing in recent years. Seminal work is being done to describe South African Englishes from phonological, morphological, and grammatical perspectives. However, limited research exists that focuses on communicative practices in digital contexts, taking into account the multimodal nature of the internet. This thesis focuses on how South Africans exploit the linguistic and visual resources at their disposal while communicating online, in order to fill empirical and methodological gaps in the field of sociolinguistics. More broadly, the aim of this thesis is to determine the influence of the internet and globalisation on language contact and change, specifically within the World Englishes paradigm. To explore communicative practices online, a 1.7 million word multimodal corpus was constructed. Since data collection had started during the COVID-19 pandemic, the corpus was tailored specifically to consist of texts related to the lockdown and the coronavirus. Each visual item was classified by type, and analysed according to their pragmatic functions within the texts. The results indicate that there is register variation, with Facebook comments including the most visual material. Emoji frequencies were compared to international rankings to determine which emojis formed part of the core lexicon for South African users. Additionally, there is evidence of conventionalisation in emoji use in terms of their semantic associations. Results show that emojis function primarily as complements to the textual component of the message. Likewise, photographs function as complements or are used for emphasis. Memes, GIFs, stickers, and other visual items are most likely to appear alone, or as substitutes for responses during discourse. The analysis of memes indicated that South Africans show a slight tendency towards glocalisation by using globally recognised forms but adding local referents. However, South Africans most often use images of local politicians and celebrities. The motivations behind image selection are for the sake of identity alignment. A KeyWord comparison was done against the British National Corpus. The top 500 keywords were subsequently categorised, analysed, and compared against GloWbe to determine their global spread. Reoccurring low frequency SAE features and constructions are likewise considered. The corpus consists of 93.8% Standard English forms, 2-3% non-standard and CMC forms, and 1-3% indigenous languages, indicating that South Africans tend to align with normative practices. The deviations appear to be restricted to the Facebook comments component of the corpus, showing that users are aware of register specific norms, and that there is an implicit understanding that creativity is acceptable in the context of social media. The use of local lexical items and pragmatic markers indicate that users on Facebook assume a shared common ground, believing their audience will understand them. Evidence reveals that language resources used online, despite the internet allowing contact between varieties of Englishes, is not deterritorialised. Instead, locality is strengthened, since users create virtual social networks that reflect their territorialised speech communities and offline realities.