ABSTRACT
The multilingual collision in colonial and post-colonial South Africa has resulted in a distributed sociolinguistics. The author illustrates four related areas mainly from South Africa. Firstly, issues of standardisation of indigenous languages; issues concerning language prestige; lack of salience of the Western variationist sociolinguistic model for a majority of languages; and finally, the robustness of contact-related variation over social dialect variation. In the Western tradition language standardisation is associated with the cultivation of a public form of a language within a territory for wider regional and functional communication than associated with any of the pre-existing dialects. One of the most successful schools of sociolinguistics in the West is based on the hierarchical model of structured heterogeneity. Labovian linguistics becomes more relevant when a new hierarchical arrangement comes into play within colonial bilingualism, consisting of an indigenous language and a new superposed language of power and prestige.
