The end of South Africa's apartheid system has led to the blurring or altering of previously clearly demarcated ethnic, political, and linguistic divisions within the country. As rhetorics and policies of separateness have been superseded by discourses of multicultural unity and equality, so too ethnically-inflected and gendered social distinctions between town, township, and village have been eroded by a national culture now developing in, and emanating from, the urban centers. The aim of this research is to locate emergent forms of urban speech which mediate shifting linguistic and social identities, ethnic and national, in Bophuthatswana, a former "ethnic homeland." The urban speech variety in question derives from two kinds of language, and mediates two kinds of identity for black South Africans. In areas of North-West Province which were formerly part of Bophuthatswana, ethnic identity cleaves to Setswana, a standardized (and now nationally-recognized) language which is nonetheless socially moribund in urban communities. South African identity, on the other hand, cleaves to Tsotsitaal, formerly a criminal argot with roots in the urban townships. Tsotsitaal's evolution into an urban variety of Setswana, which is increasingly a medium of urban national culture, is the focus of this study. It will be investigated in terms of the gendered nature of shifting social boundaries in South Africa's urban communities. Research on Tswana peoples' speech behavior and language ideologies will consist of participant observation, recording of unelicited "natural" conversation, informal interviews, and archival study. By developing (1) linguistic descriptions of speech variation and the structural relationship of Urban Setswana to Standard Setswana, and (2) a historical/ ethnographic account of forces shaping the communities in which this variation is found, it becomes possible to (3) reach broader conclusions about language's role in mediating social identities an d political change.
