Afrikaans

 

The development of Afrikaans

 

Afrikaans developed from 17th century Dutch: The East India Company (VOC) chose the Cape of Good Hope as a resting place on the route to the Indies in the 17th century. On the long sea journeys there was a need for a settled station, where fresh food and drink could be taken on board, the sick could be left behind, etc.

The first colonists in The Cape came from the southern part of the Netherlands, as can still be seen from certain details of modern Afrikaans. They were sailors and farmers, two groups with very different vocabularies and dialects. The native inhabitants of southern Africa were mostly the so-called Hottentots and Bushmen.

From 1740 onwards the daily language in South Africa was no longer pure Dutch. One of the most plausible theories on the origins of this new language is that the most important changes in Afrikaans derive from interference from other languages.

The French Huguenots who arrived in South Africa in the 16th and 17th century had no great influence on the language, though the French names still remind us of them. The French words that were taken into Afrikaans did so via the Dutch of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Even the "Malayan slaves" from Indonesia, Angola and other regions (mostly Portuguese colonies) who were brought to South Africa in the 18th century, had only a limited influence on the language. The Malay and Portuguese words in Afrikaans had already been borrowed by Dutch at an earlier stage, from mariners' language.

In the middle of the 18th century the process of deflexion (simplification and reduction of the nominal and verbal paradigms; see also loss of inflection in Middle Dutch) had already got to the stage where a separate variant of the language had arisen, "Cape Dutch". From the second half of the 18th century onwards it had established its own language system. By analysing the sources we can see the development of Dutch, via Cape Dutch, into Afrikaans.

In around 1800 the English came to South Africa. Their arrival did not, however, have any great influence on the language. The English carried on speaking their own language, and government and education were carried out in English. The Cape became a British colony. At that time English had a higher social status than Afrikaans; the upper classes, government and the intelligentsia spoke English, and Afrikaans was regarded as a "kitchen vernacular".

Those who followed the Dutch and Flemings ("conservative farmers/boers") became increasingly dissatisfied with the English government (eg emancipation of slaves) and started the "Grote Trek ['the Great Trek']" (1836-44) to the north, away from the coast. The different regions now often had their own differing variant of Afrikaans. The squabbles with the English continued.

The growing nationalism in the 19th century also demanded the defence of the language by the Afrikaans speakers. For the first time people also began to write Afrikaans down. A spelling system was devised, the language was used in education and an Afrikaans bible translation was written.
Because of the authority of the bible, this translation was important for the development of Afrikaans (see also the "States Bible" and the Gothic Bible translation).

In 1875 the Genootschap van de Regte Afrikaners (GRA) ["Society of the True Afrikaners"] was set up. They strove for the recognition of Afrikaans as a cultural language. After the second war of independence against the English (1899-1902) the "Boers" acquired self-government. Dutch became the official language. A new nationalism also led to a new language consciousness. In 1905 the Afrikaanse Taalgenootschap ["Afrikaans Language Society"] and the Afrikaanse Taalvereniging ["Afrikaans Language Union"] were set up, which each had their successes. In 1910 the Union of South Africa was granted the status of a dominion within the British Empire. In the 1920s Afrikaans was recognised as a second official language alongside English. In the 1960s the development of Afrikaans reached a provisional stopping point. Afrikaans had grown from a "language with lower functions" into a "language with higher functions" (justice, politics etc). Afrikaans is now spoken by about 6 million people, half of whom are coloured. Apart from Afrikaans and English, South Africa also has a number of non-European languages, which mostly belong to the Bantu language family. Afrikaans is also the most widely spread language in South Africa, and is used as a lingua franca between speakers of other tongues.

 

Some notable characteristics of Afrikaans

The spelling of Afrikaans rests on so-called simplified Dutch spelling. It is more phonetic than Dutch, more aimed at the pronunciation.
Important changes in Afrikaans (compared to Dutch) are:

The inflection of the verb is quite simple in Afrikaans. It is typified by a loss of endings (deflexion; see also loss of inflection in Middle Dutch). For example the present tense of the verb only has one form ek werk, jy werk, hy werk, ons werk, julle werk, hulle werkwerk ["I work" etc]. Even the infinitive has lost its ending: Afr. werk, kry - Dutch werken, krijgen ["to work, to get"]. A further simplification arose because Afrikaans has lost two tenses: the imperfect and the pluperfect. There is therefore only one way of expressing the past tense, ie the perfect.

Dutch Afr. Engl.
ik werkte ek het gewerk "I (have) worked"
hij heeft gezongen hy het gesing "he sang / has sung"
wij waren vertrokken ons het vertrek "we have / had left"

 
The latter two forms (gesing, vertrek) also illustrate another important innovation in Afrikaans, namely the disappearance of the strong verbs.

A very notable feature of the nouns concerns the genders. Whereas Dutch has two categories, the de-words and the het-words, Afrikaans has only one. All nouns use the definite article die (Dutch de vrouw, het huis - Afr. die vrou, die huis). The use of s in the plural is noticeably more common then in Dutch (eg bewegings, vorms ["movements, forms"]). Afrikaans has a number of diminutive suffixes, amongst which it is worth noting that the Dutch ending -je has been replaced by -ie (koppie, briefie ["little cup / letter"]).

Notable forms of the pronouns are the demonstratives hierdie (Dutch deze ["this"]) and daardie (Dutch die ["that"]). The Dutch indefinite pronoun men ["one" as in "one does"] does not exist in Afrikaans: Dutch men moet voorzichtig zijn ["one must be careful"] is in Afrikaans 'n mens moet versigtig wees ["a person must..."]. The reflexive pronoun zich ["self"] is unknown in Afrikaans: Dutch hij schaamt zich ["he is ashamed" - lit. "he shames himself"] is in Afrikaans hy skaam hom. In the field of syntax the so-called "double negation" is the most striking feature. Negation is expressed by two elements: the first element nie (or niemand, nooit, niks, geen etc ["not, nobody, never, nothing, no" etc] comes straight after the finite verb, the second element (always nie) always stands at the end of the sentence: hij kan nie slaap nie; sy hou nooit op met werk nie ["he cannot sleep; she never stops working"]. (see also negation in Middle Dutch)

A typical Dutch construction can be found in a sentence such as ik zat te schrijven [lit. "I sat to write"]. This construction does not exist in Afrikaans, but the idea is expressed by a combination of two verbs joined by en: ek het gesit en slaap [lit. "I have sat and sleep"]. Another example is: Dutch hij loopt te lezen - Afr. hy loop en lees ["he walks while reading", lit "he walks and reads"].

Finally one feature from the field of morphology, ie reduplication. In the spoken language there are frequent examples of doubled words, such as gou-gou, vroeg-vroeg or kort-kort. These doublings are mostly for intensification and/or iteration. It is not only adjectives that can be doubled, but nouns or verbs are also sometimes found doubled: alles kom stuk-stuk en nuut tot hom ["...gradually..."], and toe het die seun huil-huil van ontsteltenis daan aangekom ["...in tears..."]. The reduplicated verbs in such sentences take on an adverbial role.

 

Literatuur: for Afrikaans see Brinkman & Uys (z.j.) and, above all, Raidt (1983), wfrom which many of the above examples have been borrowed.

[Bibliography]

[ start of this page ]

NedWeb-Homepage  Nederlandistik-Homepage