This book discusses the linguistic reflection of ethnicity using as an illustration informal
speech patterns in the bi-ethnic Afrikaans speech community. Its theoretical outlook is based
on variationist studies and discourse studies on the processes shaping ethnicity. Two areas of
language variation come into focus namely Afrikaans morphosyntax and Afrikaans-English
code-switching. Coloured and White speech norms are quantitatively reconstructed on the basis
of a corpus of informal speech. This forms the point of departure for a qualitative
reconstruction of strategies of ethnic identity negotiation. It is shown that quantifiable
trends of linguistic convergence are not incompatible with enduring ethnic differentiation in
speech norms.
