How English loanwords are quietly reshaping Setswana verbs

The constant churn between languages is something every speaker feels, whether they are sipping a flat white in a Melbourne laneway café or chatting with elders in a Setswana-speaking village outside Molepolole. Borrowed words slip into everyday speech and, once they settle, begin to tug at the grammar around them. This article traces that tug, focusing on how English verbs entering Setswana are reshaping verb conjugation patterns.

T.J. Otlogetswe has spent years documenting this kind of contact-driven change, and his research shows that verbs are far more sensitive to borrowing than nouns. While nouns can often pass into a new language almost unchanged, verbs usually arrive stripped of their original morphology and must be fitted into a host-language template. Setswana, with its rich system of subject concords and final vowels, offers a fascinating laboratory for observing this process.

Readers in Australia will recognise parallel dynamics. Walk through the markets of Bankstown in Sydney, or listen to a group of students trading jokes in Dandenong, and you will hear English verbs mixing with Mandarin, Arabic, and Pacific Island languages in ways that mirror what is happening in southern Africa. The mechanisms of contact linguistics are not bound by geography, even when the specific outcomes vary.

The practical stakes are real. School learners in Botswana sit exams where English-origin verbs are conjugated as if they were native Setswana, and teachers must decide whether to mark such usage correct, wrong, or simply evidence of evolving usage. Understanding the mechanics helps lexicographers, translators, and language planners respond with clarity rather than alarm.

Why verbs behave differently from nouns when borrowed

Nouns borrowed from English into Setswana often slide in with little fuss: a computer becomes a khomphutha, a manager becomes a menafera, and the plural machinery of the language attaches itself with ease. Verbs are far less cooperative. English infinitives such as to google, to cancel, or to upgrade arrive without any of the inflectional endings Setswana expects, and speakers must improvise.

This improvisation is not random. Linguists working on Setswana have documented consistent patterns: the verb stem is borrowed wholesale, then placed inside the local conjugation frame. Speakers say o googla, re khansela, ba apgeida, drawing on native affixes that English never used. The result is a hybrid form that could not exist in either source language alone.

What makes this interesting is that the hybridity is systematic, not chaotic. Children acquiring Setswana as their first language produce the same kinds of forms as adults, suggesting the pattern is grammaticalising rather than being treated as a mistake. The verb system is absorbing foreign material and reshaping it from the inside.

The mechanics of Setswana verb structure

Setswana verbs carry a heavy load. Each one carries a subject concord that agrees with the noun class of the subject, plus a tense and aspect marker, the verb root itself, and a final vowel that signals mood. The classic example ke a bala contains four separate morphemes in just three syllables, and that density is typical rather than exceptional.

When an English stem enters this system, it must slot into every position. Native speakers tend to keep the English stem intact while attaching Setswana morphology around it, producing forms that follow local phonotactics. Final consonants from English that Setswana does not permit are sometimes dropped or adjusted, and the final vowel -a of the infinitive is added by analogy with thousands of inherited verbs.

The relative stability of the subject prefix slot is particularly striking. Even when speakers code-switch heavily, the concord stays anchored, tying the clause to Setswana grammar while the lexical core shifts around it. This is why borrowed verbs feel native almost immediately, even though their stems originate elsewhere.

Common English verbs slipping into daily Setswana

A walk through the Broadhurst industrial area in Gaborone reveals a vocabulary that would have bewildered Setswana speakers a generation ago. Words such as pusha (to push), skipa (to skip), bura (to bother), and blama (to blame) have become part of routine speech, and they conjugate as Setswana verbs do.

Younger speakers in Francistown use these forms fluidly, switching between fully Setswana verbs and English-derived stems depending on register and interlocutor. In a formal church service the inherited lexicon dominates, but in a WhatsApp group chat between university friends, English-origin verbs crowd the screen. The verb system absorbs both with equal grammatical ease.

Documentation of this vocabulary matters because dictionaries lag behind speech. School learners looking up o apgreida in a printed dictionary often find nothing, and teachers must improvise. Otlogetswe's work on the evolution of school dictionary preferences in Botswana shows exactly how this gap shapes what appears in the next generation of school reference books.

How suffix patterns get reanalysed

Borrowed English verbs sometimes carry weak traces of their original morphology into Setswana. Speakers occasionally hear English -ate or -ize endings and map them onto Setswana derivational patterns, producing back-formations such as treating to motivate as if -ate were a Setswana final. Reanalysis of this kind is a well-known phenomenon in language contact, and it tends to accelerate once a borrowed pattern becomes frequent.

Something similar happens with Japanese borrowings in other languages, where suffixes such as -chan and -kun are adapted creatively by speakers unfamiliar with their original social register. A look at how these Japanese honorifics travel across cultures, documented in Japanese honorific usage, shows that reanalysis of affixes is a universal feature of contact, not a quirk of any one language.

In Setswana the reanalysis is subtler. It tends to surface in the creation of derived verbs from borrowed nouns, where English email gives Setswana go imeila, and then a causative go-imelisa (to make someone email) emerges, using a perfectly native derivational suffix attached to a foreign stem. The system proves elastic.

Australian parallels with Aboriginal language work

Australia provides a particularly instructive comparison. Across the country, community linguists and language centres are working to revitalise Aboriginal languages such as Kaurna, Warlpiri, and Pitjantjatjara, and several of these efforts deal with the same kinds of contact pressures facing Setswana, where English loanwords enter these languages and must be fitted into existing verb paradigms.

The situation in communities around Adelaide, where Kaurna is being reclaimed after near-extinction, mirrors Botswana's experience in striking ways. Revitalisation programmes document how English-origin verbs are integrated, and speakers sometimes coin new forms by analogy with inherited morphology. Australian English itself draws heavily on Aboriginal languages, with words such as kangaroo, boomerang, and billabong entering everyday speech, a direction of borrowing opposite to the Setswana case but instructive all the same.

Government language policy in Canberra has begun acknowledging the value of this work, and state education departments in Victoria and Western Australia now fund Aboriginal language programmes in selected schools. The same policy attention has not yet reached Setswana verb borrowing in Botswana, but the parallels suggest there is much to learn from Australian experience.

Dictionary documentation and the Otlogetswe approach

A lexicographer facing a flood of new verb forms has to make repeated editorial decisions. Do you enter go apgreida in the dictionary, and if so, how do you indicate its conjugation? Do you flag it as informal, or treat it as fully standard? T.J. Otlogetswe's education and training prepared him to approach these choices with a corpus-driven methodology rather than guesswork.

The corpus approach means collecting thousands of attested examples from spoken Setswana, social media, and written sources, then analysing which forms recur and which are one-off slips. Recurrent forms become dictionary candidates; one-offs are noted but not codified. This empirical discipline keeps the dictionary grounded in actual usage rather than the prescriptive preferences of any single generation of writers.

The approach also lets lexicographers describe the new conjugation patterns explicitly. Rather than listing each borrowed verb in isolation, the dictionary can note that English-origin verb stems in Setswana take the full range of subject concords, the standard tense markers, and the regular final vowel, treating them as a productive morphological class. Future editions can update this generalisation as the pattern evolves.

Practical implications for learners and translators

For Setswana learners, the practical lesson is that borrowed verbs follow Setswana grammar, not English. A learner who memorises only the English infinitive will not be able to form the past tense or the negative without learning the local conjugation rules. Translation work, likewise, requires awareness that borrowed verbs carry Setswana morphology even when their stems look English.

Translators working between Setswana and English must resist the temptation to back-translate literally. An utterance such as o apgeideile mogala should not be rendered as awkward English calques but as natural English that respects both the borrowed stem and the Setswana structure around it. The art of translation lies precisely in this kind of negotiation between systems.

Classroom teachers benefit from explicit descriptions of the patterns rather than ad hoc corrections. When a learner writes o khansetse, the teacher can explain that the verb follows the regular Setswana conjugation template, not that it is wrong. Such explanations preserve the learner's confidence while still teaching the local grammar.

The next concrete step for anyone interested in this topic is to compare a 1990s Setswana dictionary entry for an inherited verb such as go bala with a recent corpus citation of an English-origin form such as o apgeida. Doing so makes the difference between inherited and borrowed verb morphology visible at a glance, and it is the kind of evidence-based observation that strengthens any subsequent lexicographic, educational, or translational decision.