Pretoria is one of the most multi-lingual cities in South Africa. Many of this city’s Black African residents speak an urban and a non-standard variety called Sepitori, which is a mixed language which developed in the late 1800s due to contact between speakers of two mutually intelligible languages, namely, Setswana and Northern Sotho. To explore the prevalence of contributing languages to Sepitori, Madingwaneng (2019) focused on the linguistic contribution of Northern Sotho on Sepitori, and that left a gap as far as Setswana is concerned. The aim of this study is to analyze how Setswana contributed to the development of Sepitori through establishing the former’s lexical items and those which potentially underwent morpho-phonological changes and semantic shifts. It is also aimed at analyzing Sepitori lexical items coined from Setswana. Naturally occurring data were gathered through regular conversations with many residents across 12 townships in the greater Pretoria area. The residents were approached at their regular places where they ordinarily socialise as acquaintances and friends, thus were randomly selected. The 48 hours of recordings constitutes the largest Sepitori corpus ever gathered. However, for the purposes of this abstract/presentation, only data from Ga-Rankuwa and Mabopane will be analyzed. The two townships have been selected because most of their residents culturally identify as Batswana even if they communicate in Sepitori. Among others, the study found that residents code-switched freely between Sepitori and Setswana to a point where they could not draw a line between the two. Like Madingwaneng (2019), this study found conclusive evidence about the morpho-phonological changes and semantic shifts, and more importantly, evidence that Setswana contributed immensely to the development of Sepitori.

Madingwaneng, L.M. 2019. Linguistic contributions of Northern Sotho to Sepitori: Perspectives of Northern Sotho home language speakers brought up in Tshwane. Master’s dissertation, Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria.