Hybridity, globalisation and models of Englishes: English in South African multilingual digital repertoires

Current models of Englishes face empirical challenges, such as multilingualism, hybrid varieties, complex identities, online communication and other consequences of globalisation, alongside a number of conceptual and methodological challenges. In this chapter, we explicate these challenges, and offer a corpus-linguistic analysis of interactive, online data from South Africa, in an attempt to expand current models. The data reveal that a shared pool of English resources form the core of the online interactions, but this is supplemented by resources from a global online repertoire, global and local non-standard English forms, and forms from other South African languages. Users make selections from these resources, to communicate and align with other users, and in the process, express their hybrid, complex identities by combining these resources. An adequate model has to provide for a diverse resource pool, selection processes and the eventual diversity of text types emerging from communicative interactions.