LaPASC

 South Africa (and Potchefstroom) provides an excellent laboratory for research into language change and variation in language-contact settings in which indigenous, colonial and immigrant languages have been in contact and have influenced one another for many years. As such we embrace the multilingual nature of South African society and our research project is particularly focused on exploring the effects of such contact on traditional socio(linguistic) phenomena. The project is open to research on all or any of the languages of Potchefstroom at their different levels of analysis (from phonetics to pragmatics) and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

The Potchefstroom Neighbourhood Corpus (PNC) is a digital, annotated, spoken-language corpus, mainly based on sociolinguistic interviews conducted as part of the LaPASC project in Potchefstroom. The Afrikaans component (now referred to as PNC-Afrikaans) is the first stage in this sub-project of LaPASC. 

We are an interdisciplinary and intergenerational research team consisting of lecturers, researchers and postgraduate students. If you want to become part of the team, please contact us. We would gladly assist you.

Read more about the universities that formed a partnership to make this research project successful.