Afrikaans norms of spoken usage and the desirability of re-standardizing Standard Afrikaans along ethnic lines

In the wake of social unrest in South Africa, calls for reforming Standard Afrikaans made themselves increasingly heard from the late 1970s. It was generally agreed that the traditional normative criteria 'distance from English' and 'conformity to Dutch' can no longer serve as yardsticks for Afrikaans standardization. Instead, it was suggested to take 'norms of general usage' as a point of reference. There nowadays seems to be a consensus that those 'norms of general usage' amount to the actual usage, both formal and informal, of educated native speakers. As regards the geographic location of these norms, suggestions to identify it with the speech varieties of the Western Cape, on the ground that the majority of native Afrikaans speakers (mainly Coloureds) are to be found there, were swept aside on the grounds that the economic centre of the Afrikaans speech community is Gauteng. This amounts to saying that the Standard Afrikaans norm is determined by White usage. A couple of years have passed since the topic of reforming Standard Afrikaans was discussed, and it may be useful to reconsider the whole issue against the background of recent sociolinguistic developments in South Africa.
On the basis of an ethnically and geographically representative corpus of roughly 500.000 words, collected into samples involving three distinct age cohorts of White and Coloured Afrikaans speakers, it turns out that White morphosyntactic varieties are converging irrespective of geographic location. Coloured varieties, on the other hand, are marked by an opposition between the Western Cape and the Northern Cape/Namibia. Convergence between Afrikaans varieties may generally take place, but it often translates in the increased use of certain non-standard features. On this basis, I argue that there exist more viable options for enhancing the ethnic representativity of Standard Afrikaans than adopt Coloured features of which the diffusion is regionally restricted. Among these options, I point out one in particular: Those non-standard features which are increasingly widespread across regional and ethnic divides could at least be recognized by standard prescriptive sources as pertaining to a standard colloquial register of Afrikaans.