Gender, Writing and Editing in South African Englishes: A Case Study of the Genitive Alternation

Abstract

This chapter investigates the intersection between gender, writing and editing of published written texts and endonormativity in South African English. We focus on three sub-varieties within the South African context: two indigenous strands, Afrikaans English (AfrE) and Black South African English (BSAfE), and the settler strand, White South African English (WSAfE). We use multifactorial methods to analyse the effects of gender amongst a set of linguistic and extra-linguistic variables conditioning the genitive alternation across unedited and edited texts produced by AfrE, BSAfE and WSAfE authors. The results show that gender plays a minor role in conditioning the genitive alternation for both authors and editors, demonstrating that the genitive choices of men and women are conditioned in similar ways. As expected, linguistic factors play the greatest role in conditioning the genitive alternation. Our findings confirm recent investigations into cross-varietal and register differences and show that while the direction of the effect of linguistic factors is the same across sub-varieties and registers, the strength of these factors differs in certain sub-varieties and registers. Our findings also confirm recent findings regarding the genitive alternation in second-language varieties and suggest a possible substrate transfer effect, in especially BSAfE writing. Although editorial intervention introduces subtle shifts in preferences for the two constructions, this intervention mostly reinforces the choices of authors.