Justifying their existence: South African varieties of English

The analysis of written and spoken discourse, supplemented by a historical account of attitudes to English (culminating in a current attitudinal linguistic survey), serves as a prolegomenon to the work that lies ahead for language planners and teachers who wish to widen, strategically, the acceptable range of variation within the standard. This would force (post-) colonial hybridity-as-conflict in the periphery upon the (‘western’) centre, which will in turn pre-empt ‘business as usual’ there. (Parakrama 1995:xiii)