Investigates stress placement in one variety of Black South African English (BSAE), namely Tswana English. A corpus of 333 polysyllabic words was analyzed in detail to determine the properties of the Tswana English stress system; properties were interpreted by means of optimality theory. Concludes that stress is stored lexically in function words, but a coherent system of ranked constraints exists for content words. (Author/VWL)