World Englishes, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 93–107, 2013. 0883-2919 Black South African English on the radio LEKETI MAKALELA ∗ ABSTRACT: For most rural communities in South Africa, community radio remains the most common mass communication channel which models English speech forms and functions. Whereas print media has received some attention in the earlier works on Black South African English (BSAE) research, the speech tokens used in the radio have not been empirically studied to date. In order to fill this gap and expand previous work on the variety, this study investigated high-frequency features of BSAE drawn from a corpus of 209,000 words from a rural English-medium community radio in Limpopo Province. Normalized frequency rates of syntactic, discourse and pragmatic features were calculated, using corpus quantification procedures, which were complemented by a cross-linguistic analysis of the selected features with an upper limit of 10,000 words. The findings of the study provide evidence that BSAE has evolved alongside the nativization and endonormative phases proposed in Schneider’s Dynamic Model and that both the radio usage and reliance on the logic of Bantu language substrate forms, in combination, reinforce its stabilization. Implications for future research directions are offered at the end of the paper. INTRODUCTION The development of Black South African English (BSAE), like other emerging new En- glishes, has received considerable attention in the last 17 years (Buthelezi 1995; Gough 1996; Kasanga 2006; De Klerk 2006; Mesthrie 2006a; 2006b; Van Rooy 2006; 2010; Makalela 2007; Van Rooy and Terblanche 2010) with a specific focus on its distinguishable features. This increased focus gained momentum with the advent of the new sociolinguistic dispensation that accorded official status to 11 languages (RSA 1996). Unlike previous studies which maintained that this variety consisted of a mere conglomeration of “errors” that needed remedial attention (e.g. Lanham 1984), the last 17 years were, conversely, characterized by a plethora of studies drawing attention to the sociolinguistic reality that local innovations in this variety have taken root (e.g. De Klerk 2003; Kasanga 2003; Makalela 2004b; Mesthrie 2004) and that these innovations are reproduced through what Blommaert, Muyllaert, Huysmans and Dyers (2005: 379) consider a “reappropriation of the unattainable English.” Characteristically, non-native speakers of English localize and spread non-standard forms especially in contexts where access to the exonormative forms (standards) is limited. The ultimate result is that “a hybrid English is becoming institution- alized and recognized as a viable vehicle” (Kachru 2006: 451) of communication among a community of speakers who share similar rules of interpretation. South Africa is a prototypical case where only about 5 per cent of the population are “occidental owners” (Kachru 2006) of English whereas the rest of the population uses it as a second, third or fourth additional language in a range of social functions. In post-apartheid ∗ University of the Witwatersrand-Languages, Literacies & Literatures Private Bag 3, WITS 2050, Johannesburg, Limpopo 2050, South Africa. E-mail: makalela@gmail.com C  2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd