Making sense of BSAE for linguistic democracy in South Africa

:  This paper re-examines the debate over the emergence of Black South African English (BSAE) as a variety of English that is institutionalized with distinct properties. It focuses on the tense logic in Bantu languages and discourse markers that chiefly account for uniquely BSAE features. Through an in-depth analysis of these linguistic properties, the paper presents fresh angles of reconceptualizing the status of BSAE, which might move the debate to a level that makes sense to the policy-makers and language planners. In the end, I argue for English harmonization in South Africa as a necessary path to empowering the local masses that are otherwise excluded through the orthodox tradition of upholding British Standard English in African classrooms.