Phonological integration of borrowings in Namibian German: language variation and social meaning in a postcolonial context

Abstract This paper investigates how speakers of Namibian German, a vital minority language in present-day Namibia, phonologically adapt borrowings. A quantitative study of spoken data from the corpus DNam reveals that nearly every examined phonological feature varies between phonologically non-integrated (e.g., Afrikaans [ə͜ʊ] kie ‘guy’) and integrated forms (e.g., [oː] kie or [a͜ʊ] kie ). A multifactorial regression model shows that different factors significantly increase the likelihood of phonological integration, such as stylized language use and male speaker gender. The statistical results suggest that phonological integration pertains to metalinguistic ideas about prototypical Namibian German language use, which relate to auto-stereotypes that are rooted in the community’s settler-colonial ancestry, with implications for the construction of gender. Urban adolescent speakers’ articulation (i.e., non-integration) of clicks, on the other hand, possibly serves as an index of specifically Pan-Namibian urban pluralism. The interpretations find preliminary support in additional qualitative observations, such as metalinguistic comments by speakers of Namibian German. While some interpretations take the shape of new hypotheses, I argue that the findings in this paper do provide a glimpse into how postcolonial categories factor into the linguistic construction of social meaning, and how the study of socially meaningful language variation may contribute to an anthropological understanding of postcolonial contexts.