The Influence of English on Afrikaans

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Chapter One

1.0 Introduction

In the society of the Republic of South Africa there is a maze of language contact situations. There is the former contact situation that arose between the indigenous Hottentots and Bushmen (the Khoisan peoples) on the one hand and the immigrants of Bantu origin from points further north on the other. Then there is the contact situation that currently exists between various Bantu languages themselves that has intensified this century with the increasing urbanisation of South Africa's Blacks. There is then in turn the contact situation that is occurring as the various Bantu languages become more and more exposed to English and/or Afrikaans. In addition there is the contact situation, chiefly in Natal, between the various Indian languages and Zulu or the Indian languages and English, and, to a far lesser degree, Afrikaans. Last but not least there is the obvious, and from the European point of view most important and interesting contact situation that exists between English and Afrikaans, the two official languages of the White minority and lingua francas of many of the non-White population. The ideas of empire that gave birth to my own nation (Australia) brought together, at much the same time in history, English and Dutch in South Africa to create a contact situation which was inevitably to give rise to a symbiotic relationship between the two, but one in which the influence was to be, for historical and socio-economic reasons (cf. 2.1.1), more in the one direction than the other.

Although the last word has possibly not been said even about the influence of Afrikaans on English, there is certainly no doubt that there is still much to be said about the reverse process. That will constitute the content of this book. Probably no single aspect of Afrikaans linguistics warrants more attention today than the effect the English language has had, and is continuing to have, on Afrikaans. Possibly because of the volatility of the topic and the difficulty of approaching it with a degree of empiricism, even the Taalkommissie of the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns has not been able to apply its talents to date to producing an authoritative analysis of the extent of English influence. The Taalkommissie is aware of this shortcoming and of the necessity of such a document appearing in the not too distant future, (cf. p. 6-7) I hope that this work may go some way towards assisting the Taalkommissie in its enormous task of compiling a modern authoritative work on anglicisms (an ambiguous term at this stage, cf. 2.00) in Afrikaans which will be generally accepted throughout South Africa as the standard work on the subject. I

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would be very pleased if my research could make even a modest contribution to this most urgent of publications.

I consider it important that the outside world be made acquainted with this unique aspect of South African civilisation and perhaps learn something from it:

‘The linguistic situation of the Republic of South Africa is exceptionally interesting to the student of language contact and bilingualism. It offers a context of languages, dialects and linguistic communities which has no exact parallel elsewhere and which for this reason alone deserves study.’ (Van Wyk 1978: 29)

For this reason I chose to write in English and not in Afrikaans. Writing in English is definitely why, to the continual irritation of many Afrikaans academics, the opinions of Valkhoff (1966, 1972) on Afrikaans reached so many people outside South Africa with his two publications which many South Africans consider heretical. It is perhaps unfortunate that a work such as this, which also deals with an aspect of the impurity of Afrikaans, should be accessible to a world-wide public while all those works which concentrate on the opposite are not. Perhaps Afrikaans academic circles should learn something from this if they could only overcome the feeling, which I assume they have, that to write in English is to undermine the position of the very thing they seek to nurture and protect, for example:

‘Oor die vanselfsprekende verantwoordelikheid van elke Afrikaanssprekende om in Afrikaans te publiseer, wil ek nie eers praat nie’. (Odendal 1984: 197)