Afrikaans, something more than “Apartheid”

I have always thought the learning of a language as the discovery of a treasure chest. Break that lock and you’ll have free access to a whole culture, as it is true that the history of a country, its social compound and any intimate or psychological matter that affects people finds it voice through a precise word. Therefore it is my belief that Afrikaans suffered devaluation when, after 1948 with the ascension of the Afrikaans National Party, it was defined merely as the language of “Apartheid”. Afrikaans is much more than the attempt to impose a culture over Native Africans through the Educational System. Just ask yourself where Afrikaans comes from, how did it develop and why? Nice questions to deal with, aren’t they? As Afrikaans is actually one of the eleven official languages spoken in South Africa, widely used in Namibia, less but still vital in Lesotho, Botswana, Malawi and Mozambique and somehow surviving among Australians, New Zealanders and Americans.

Afrikaans derives from the Dutch spoken in South Holland, which penetrated South Africa with the first European migrants, known as Boers, who settled there during the 17th Century and founded Cape Town City. This dialect developed gradually, went through simplification, was influenced by local as well as by other European derived languages and became the autonomous expression of a culture, although we will have to wait until 1950s to assist to its standardization as a written language.
Before this period, as it was previously told, Afrikaans was affected by the influence of non-European languages, as Pidgins spoken by Asian slaves (with their Portuguese mixed up with some Malay, as races were mingling). Then, during the first half of the 18th Century, the Western Dutch of Masters also met the local language and culture of Khoikhoin people, even known as Hottentot, and was transmitted to the next generation by the patient care of indigenous nannies. The second half of the 18th Century sees Afrikaans transformed once again by the arrival of a wave of workers from North and West Germany. The newly changed Afrikaans was able to reach the interior to free itself prematurely from Standard Dutch. On the coast Afrikaans replaced Standard Dutch only in 1925 and, finally, in 1933, it gained enough dignity to become for the first time the language of the Bible.

Undoubtedly, the hegemony of the Afrikaners and the consequent racial segregation, due to the enactment of the “Apartheid Laws” in 1948, produced, as a result, the rejection of the Afrikaans language among Native South African people who preferred to use English as their communication medium. As a reaction to this trend, the Afrikaner government imposed in 1976 the use of Afrikaans in all African Native schools with the so-called “Afrikaans Medium Decree”. Students’ reaction led to the “Soweto uprising”; it was just the beginning of eight months of violent revolts. At this point, Afrikaans was irreparably the language of the oppressors and it remained so in people’s head until 1990s, first with the repealing of Apartheid and later with the election of the first Native African president, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.

This was, in brief, the story that brought to the shaping of the present-day Afrikaans, as a standard and autonomous language, but it happens people still smile while hearing Afrikaners speaking as they recognize the strong and odd similarities between this language and Dutch. Perhaps many consider Afrikaans as a mangling of the mother language, of course a symptom of ignorance. Linguists, instead, appreciate the many variations and simplification phenomena intervened in the evolution and regularization of the morphology, grammar and spelling of the new language.

For example, among writing simplifications we can find the conversion of Dutch into or into . Moreover, Dutch and have become, which sounds [tsi], and and are [tsio] in Afrikaans. Dutch sounds, and have been reduced simply to and the dropping of the final has left a sound, that Afrikaans renders with the final written . Spelling simplification, instead, implies the reduction of final Dutch consonants <z/s> to [s] and intervocalic <v/w> to [w]. Fricatives tend to lenition or disappear, especially in the intervocalic position.  Grammar differences between Dutch and Afrikaans are certainly more evident, as the second owns no gender and only one article; verbs at present and infinitive tense coincide, while the imperfect tense is almost extinct.

As above mentioned, Afrikaans is daughter to Dutch but received much from the presence of the Cape Malay community in terms of lexicon heritage; some lexical influence came also from the presence in South Africa of local Portuguese, Khoisan, Khosa and Zulu ethnic groups.
After the democratic election that took place in 1994, Afrikaans has seen its role confirmed, but only as one of the eleven official languages of South Africa. In fact, is has lost the position of main authority in the public sphere in favor of English, the new established ‘lingua franca’: globalization is suffocating smaller cultures and languages and Afrikaans speakers are already teaching English to their children as mother tongue. The question is: “How long will Afrikaans resist, if Government does not care for its survival?”

Tags: Africa, dutch, Etymology

Category: Foreign Language