Black South African English the variety of English used by mother-tongue speakers of South
Africa's indigenous languages has received considerable attention during the last two decades.
However so far most of the accounts of this variety have been only qualitative in nature. This
book reports on one of the first studies offering extensive quantitative analyses of four
typical features of Black South African English grammar: omission of past tense marking
extended use of the progressive aspect article omission and use of left dislocation. Drawing
on a corpus of spoken data the study's focus lies on the investigation of the stability of the
selected features and hence aims to ascertain which of these are characteristic of Black South
African English as a whole. Speakers exhibiting differing levels of competence in English are
compared. It is shown that the analysed features are used by speakers of Black South African
English regardless of their proficiency level but at the same time there are considerable
differences concerning the frequency of occurrence of these features.
