Abstract:
The major purpose of this thesis was to examine the nativisation of the English language in Namibia with a specific study conducted at the Namibian University of Science and Technology during the 2018 academic year. The 13 official indigenous languages in Namibia have an impact in the nativisation process. The English language in Namibia has been nativised and made local to such an extent that it is used in official settings.
The study was guided by the World Englishes model formulated by Kachru in the early 1980s, which allocates the presence of English into three concentric circles. Namibian English, called (Namlish), one of the non-native varieties of English, has reached the nativisation phase (Schneider, 2003, 2007) where lexicon-grammatical restructuring mostly occurs. This study sought to explore the processes of nativisation and how this new variant has had an effect on standard English and different linguistic levels. The methodology involved a generation of corpus of words, phrases and sentences derived from participants obtained through the International Corpus of English (ICE) sampling methodology with a focus on Namibian students only. Data was mostly composed through casual recordings, and transcripts of conversations and interviews, which constituted the oral corpus. Findings gathered from the data analysed showed that most students use nativised words, phrases and sentences. Triggered by the inference of the mother tongue and borrowing, code-switching and code-mixing of the English language has become common and acceptable. However, the nativisation of a language is a process; therefore, more corpus studies are needed to explore this language phenomenon. It is believed that this thesis will arouse the desire for an in-depth research in the area of nativisation of the English language in Namibia by other future researchers.
