Fitzmaurice, S. orcid.org/0000-0002-8804-1987 (2017) When natives became Africans: A historical sociolinguistic study of semantic change in colonial discourse. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 3 (1). pp. 1-36. ISSN 2199-2894
Abstract
The word native is a key term in nineteenth-century British colonial administrative vocabulary. The question is how it comes to be central to the classification of indigenous subjects in Britain’s southern African possessions in the early twentieth century, and how the word is appropriated by colonial citizens to designate the race of indigenous subjects. To answer the question, I construct a semasiological history of native as a word that has to do with the identification of a person with a place by birth, by residence or by citizenship. I track the manner in which speakers invest old words with new meanings in specific settings and differentiate among them in different domains. In the case of native, a signal keyword is recruited to do particular work in several contemporaneous discourses which take different ideological directions as the nature of the involvement of their speakers changes. The result is a particularly complicated word history, and one which offers a clue to the ways in which colonial rhetoric is domesticated in specific settings at the very same time as the colonising power eschews it in the process of divesting itself of its colonies.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. The final publication is available at www.degruyter.com. |
Keywords: | colonial discourse; language ideology; race; semantic-pragmatic change; contingent polysemy |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of English (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 12 Apr 2017 11:35 |
Last Modified: | 30 Apr 2020 14:14 |
Published Version: | http://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2017-0001 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Walter de Gruyter GmbH |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1515/jhsl-2017-0001 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:114972 |