Botswana English

Abstract

The paper discusses some of the syntactic and lexical features of Botswana English. The syntactic features are the tag questionisn't it?and the conversational tagis it?, the exclamationSharp!, the indefinite pronoun phrasethe other one, the dangling modifier, the inversion of auxiliary verb and subject in reported questions, the redundant use of personal / reflexive pronouns, the use of the negative auxiliarydon't,the conflation of the English adjectivesorryand the Setswana adverbialhoo!,the use of the subordinating conjunctionwhichand the modal auxiliarycan be able.The lexical items discussed include Setswana words that have been borrowed and/or translated into English and words such ascondomise,diarise,shameandbrigadewhich have been formed through the processes of derivation and semantic extension. The lexical and syntactic features are those which the researcher has observed, over a six-year period, to be in frequent and widespread use in Botswana.