PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Submitted Abstract: "English, despite its limited history within the country, gained significant ground in Namibia over the last 30 years, which has become evident through recent quantitative and qualitative research on English in Namibia (cf. e.g. Buschfeld & Kautzsch 2014; Kautzsch & Schröder 2016, Stell 2016). This research also suggests that English is moving from foreign to second language status with nativization being observable on several linguistic levels. Additionally, in Namibia’s urban center, the former Afrikaans-dominated diglossic situation is progressively changing towards a “triglossic pattern dominated by English” (Stell 2016: 326). What could complement this traditional picture, and is missing thus far, is a digital perspective: Young Namibians use online social media services in all their facets, including content creation on the video-sharing platform YouTube. Since the audience of these channels transcends national and ethnic boundaries, this data could shed light on general questions of Namibian sociolinguistic standards and identities as well as details of the role and features of English in Namibia. The majority of Namibian YouTubers use English for their broadcasts from the periphery and almost exclusively produce natural videos, according to the typology proposed by Schneider (2016), which renders this digital content a valuable yet largely unexplored resource in the World Englishes context. The present paper aims to address this methodological gap by using a corpus consisting of five hours of YouTube data to scrutinize recent hypotheses on the status and features of Namibian English, focusing on phonological aspects such as splits in the lexical sets NURSE and KIT as well as mergers of the DRESS, TRAP, and NURSE vowels (cf. Kautzsch et al. 2017)."