South Africa is a country characterised by great linguistic diversity. Large indigenous languages, such as isiZulu and isiXhosa, are spoken by many millions of people, as well as the languages with European roots, such as Afrikaans and English, which are spoken by several millions and used by many more in daily life. This situation provides a plethora of contact scenarios, all of which have resulted in language variation and change, and which forms the main focus of this insightful volume. Written by a team of leading scholars, it investigates a range of sociolinguistic factors and the challenges that South Africans face as a result of multilingualism and globalisation in both education and social interaction. The historical background to English in South Africa provides a framework within which the interfaces with other languages spoken in the country are scrutinised, whilst highlighting processes of contact, bilingualism, code-switching and language shift.

Raymond Hickey is Professor of English Linguistics at the Universität Duisburg–Essen, Germany. His main research interests are varieties of English, language contact, variation and change. Some of his recent publications include Listening to the Past (Cambridge, 2017), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (Cambridge, 2017) and English in the German Speaking World (Cambridge, forthcoming).