- `Prolegomena to the history of Indian languages in South Africa’. Journal of the University of Durban-Westville, New Series 1, 57-72. 1984.
- `From OV to VO in language shift: South African Indian English and its OV substrates’. English World Wide. 8:2, 263-276. 1987.
- `South African Indian English: some characteristic features’. English Usage in Southern Africa. 19,1: 1-11. 1988.
- `Toward a lexicon of South African Indian English’. World Englishes. 7:1, 5-14. 1988.
- `The Origins of Fanagalo’. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. 4:2, 211-240. 1989.
- `Did the Butler do it?: on an analogue of Butler English in Natal, South Africa’. World Englishes. 9:3, 282-288. 1990.
- `Syntactic variation in language shift: the relative clause in South African Indian English’. Language Variation and Change. 2:1, 31-56. 1990. (with Timothy T. Dunne).
- `The linguistic reflex of social change: Caste and kinship among people of Indian descent in Natal’. Anthropological Linguistics 32:3-4, 335-353. 1992.
- `South African English’, 3000 word article commissioned by the CUP magazine, English Today. January 1993. (Reproduced in UNISA English II course book for 1995, and in UCT English I reader, 1995.)
- `Koineization in the Bhojpuri-Hindi diaspora, with special reference to South Africa’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 99: 25-44. 1993.
- `Gandhi and language politics’. Bua. 8,4: 4-7. 1993.
- `Nineteenth-century attestations of Afrikaans-English code-mixing in the Cape’. Language Matters. 24:47-62. 1993.
- `South African Indian English’ English Today. April 1993, 12-16.
- `English language studies and social history in South Africa’. English Academy Review. 1994.
- (with K. McCormick) ‘Standardisation and variation in South African English’, in Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus (SPIL Plus), 26:181-201. 1994.
- `Towards a grammar of proto South African English’, English World-Wide, 16,2: 105-134. 1995. (with Paula West).
- `Reversing language shift: problems and possibilities’. Journal of the Indological Society of South Africa. 2 & 3:1-20. 1995.
- `Putting some Linguistics into Applied Linguistics: a sociolinguistic study of left dislocation in South African Black English’. SPIL Plus. (Stellenbosch papers in Linguistics), 29: 260-283. 1996.
- `Lessons in Survival: 120 years of Makhuwa and Yao in South Africa’. Bua. 10,2: 14-16. 1996.
- `Imagint excusations: `Missionary English in the nineteenth-century Cape colony, South Africa’. World Englishes, 15,2:139-157. 1996.
- `Lexicography from below’. Studia Anglica Posnaniensa. 31:154-161. 1997.
- Indian Languages in Africa: a field report, 1900-1995. In Yearbook of South Asian Languages, 1997.
- `The Cape’s neglected languages: a review essay arising out of Y. Mohammed (ed.) A History of Arabic Language Teaching in South Africa. Journal for Islamic Studies, 17:74-85. 1997.
- `Words across Worlds: aspects of language contact and language learning in the eastern Cape, 1800-1850’. African Studies, 57:1, 1998.
- `Fifty ways to say “I do”: tracing the origins of unstressed do in Cape Flats English’. South African Journal of Linguistics, 17(1): 58-71, 1999.
- `Male workers’ English in the western Cape – interlanguage, code-switching, pidginisation’, Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics, special issue on South Africa (edited by S. & E. Ridge & S. Makoni). 2000: 151-174.
- Dravidian Hindi in South Africa: an historical variety. The Yearbook of South Asian Languages. 2000: 49-59.
- South Asian languages in Mauritius. Yearbook of South Asian Languages. 2000: 205-8.
- Endogeny versus contact revisited: aspectual busy in South African English. Language Sciences, 2002. 24(3-4): 345-358.
- Mock languages and symbolic power: the South African radio series ‘Applesammy and Naidoo’. World Englishes, 2002. 21(1):99-112.
- `The World Englishes paradigm and contact linguistics – refurbishing the foundations’. World Englishes. 2003 . 22 (4): 449-62.
- `Children in language shift: the syntax of fifth-generation South African Indian English speakers’. South African Journal of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies. 2003. 21(3):119-26.
- `Putting back the cart before the horse: the spelling form fallacy in Second Language Acquisition Studies, with special reference to the treatment of schwa in Black South African English’. English World Wide, 2005. 26 (2): 127-151.
- `Assessing representations of South African Indian English in writing: an application of Variation theory’. Language Variation and Change, 2005. 17: 303-326.
- Anti-deletions in a second language variety: a study of Black South African English mesolect. English World Wide, 2006, 27(2):111-146.
- Language, transformation and development: a sociolinguistic appraisal of post-apartheid South African language policy and practice. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2006, 24(2): 151-163.
- ‘Subordinate immigrant languages and language endangerment: two community studies from KwaZulu-Natal’ Language Matters. 2006, 34:75-99.
- ‘Undeletions in Black South English’, SPIL (Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics) Plus. 2006.
- ‘World Englishes and the multilingual history of English’. World Englishes, 2006, 25(3/4): 381-90.
- ‘The origins of colloquial South African Tamil’. Oriental Anthropologist. 2007, 7(1): 17-38.
- ‘Differentiating pidgin from early interlanguage: pidgin Nguni (Fanakalo) versus second language varieties of Xhosa and Zulu. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2007, 25(1):75-89.
- A bird’s eye view of South African Tamil. Language Matters. 2007, 38(2):179-94.
- ‘Language shift, cultural change and identity retention: Indian South Africans in the 1960s and beyond’. South African Historical Journal. 2007, 57: 134-152.
- Necessary versus sufficient conditions for using new languages in South African higher education: a linguistic appraisal. Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development. 2008, 29(4):325-340. Selected by the publishers as Routledge’s best article on the thinking of Michael Halliday (50 Key thinkers in Linguistics); and for an e-collection on language in Africa.
- Is English a glottophagic language in South Africa? English Today. 2008. 24(2):13-19.
- South Africa. In Yearbook of South Asian Languages. 2008: 237-41.
- The risks of crossing: a retrospect from apartheid South Africa. SPIL PLUS. 2009.
- Socio-phonetics and social change: deracialisation of the GOOSE vowel in South African English. Journal of Sociolinguistics. 2010. 14(1):3-33. Listed on the Journal website as number 1 article over the 3 year period 2010-13.
- New Englishes and the native speaker. Language Sciences. 2010. 32(6):594-601. (listed as no. 14 of the top articles in Language Sciences in the 12 year period 2000-2011).
- Ethnicity, substrate and place: the dynamics of Coloured and Indian English in five South African cities in relation to the variable (t). Language Variation and Change. 24(3):371-396. 2012.
- (with Ellen Hurst) Slang registers, code-switching and restructured urban varieties in South Africa: an analytic overview of tsotsitaals with special reference to the Cape Town variety. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 28(1): 103-130. 2013.
- Where does a New English dictionary stop?: on the making of the Dictionary of South African Indian English. English Today. 29(1):36-43. 2013.
- “When you hang out with the guys it keeps you in style” – the case for considering style in South African tsotsitaals. Language Matters 44(1): 3-20. 2013.
Journal articles