A new variety in the making

Namibian English (NamE) is a recent addition to the family of World Englishes and therefore an interesting variety for the study of norm development and variety status. This contribution discusses the emergence of variety-specific norms at the prosodic level in NamE on the basis of an empirical analysis of elicited spoken language. This analysis shows that NamE prosody indeed exhibits features not reported for other varieties of English. As these features occur independently of the speakers’ ethnolinguistic backgrounds, they cannot be interpreted as L1-induced contact phenomena but should rather be identified as expressions of a local but pan-Namibian identity. This suggests that – at least at the prosodic level – new norms are emerging in NamE, hence marking the development towards endonormativity.