An assessment of high school pupils' attitude towards the pronunciation of black South African English

Abstract

The results indicated that pupils from all three language groups were, to some extent, guilty of racist judgements in evaluating SAE. The Sotho pupils consistently rated acrolectal BSAE the highest; the Afrikaans pupils did the same with standard white SAE. The English pupils preferred BSAE in the video input, but supported standard white SAE in the sound input. This seems to indicate that some of them have, to a certain extent, become more lenient and less critical towards BSAE. It became quite evident from this study; that BSAE is evaluated most positively among black speakers, and in certain cases, also among white SAE speakers.