English in Southern Africa

Abstract

The previous body of sociolinguistics literature is replete with historical accounts of the arrival of the English language in southern Africa (see, for example, Lanham 1982; Gough 1995; Branford 1996; Kamwangamalu 2002; Meierkord 2005). These studies indicate that English-speaking people made initial contact with southern Africa prior to the period of formal British colonization of the region. According to Gough (1995: 1), English explorers and traders who visited southern Africa from as early as the sixteenth century introduced a vocabulary of the English language describing the land and peoples they had come into contact with.