The Influence of English on Afrikaans

6.3 The role of contributing factors (versterkende faktore)

Scholars have often postulated that the origins of various suspect structures are to be found in older Dutch or dialects and yet because they also occur in English, which is presumably why they are considered suspect, such scholars have felt obliged to add a rider to their claims, for example:

‘Engels kan hoogstens 'n behoudende invloed gehad het’ (Le Roux 1952: 35),
‘...dit [English influence] natuurlik tot die behoud van die uitdrukking kon bygedra het.’ (Terblanche, Die Brandwag, 18/10/46)

Boshoff (1963: 39) describes the phenomenon as follows:

‘Ek meen dat Afrikaans meermale uit Nederlands of sy dialekte eienaardighede wat daar om die een of ander rede verlore gegaan het, behou het deurdat Engels verskynsels van 'n min of meer gelyke aard gehad het wat behoudend daarop ingewerk en die voortbestaan daarvan help bestendig het.’

The term contributing factor refers to the role English has possibly played in such cases, i.e. that of a catalyst. One can seldom prove that this is the case, as there is usually some evidence of an alternative source, but nevertheless structures that fall into this category can be considered as another form of pseudo-anglicism. In addition, one can identify two distinct kinds of contributing factor: 1) there are those which correspond with former Dutch structures and thus have a behoudende effect on the same structure in Afrikaans; 2) there are those which correspond with innovative developments in Afrikaans with no connection with former Dutch structures. In such cases the contributing factor in English can be said to have had a pro-

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gressive, rather than a conservative effect. Examples of this are possibly certain s-plurals in Afrikaans (cf. 7.17.6) and the following concluding remark from De Bruto's (1970: 42) discussion on shifting stress in the international vocabulary of Afrikaans:

‘Linguïsties sal hoogstens binne 'n groot vergelykingsraamwerk, gesê kan word dat die Afrikaanse patroon net verhaas kan gewees het deur Engelse beïnvloeding...’

Ponelis (1979) also makes continual reference to the possibility of English constituting a contributing factor, for example: ‘Versterkende Engelse invloed kan in die volgende gevalle vermoed word.’ (p. 90)

The instances where contributing factors have been postulated by scholars in the literature on anglicisms are legion. It is also an issue on which there has been a great deal of disagreement, but this is to be expected owing to the impossibility of proving what role, if any, similar structures in English have played. Where coexistence in the two languages of similar phenomena has contributed to the frequency of one option over another, one must presumably imagine that the speaker's familiarity with a structure in English, which has a counterpart in Dutch/Afrikaans and which competes with another that is unknown in English, causes him to favour the former because it sounds all the more familiar to him - a product of his bilingualism. A case in point is perhaps the use and form of the reflexive pronoun in Afrikaans compared with Dutch. There are verbs, e.g. voel,² which Afrikaans dictionaries regard as non-reflexive, as in English. There are others which the dictionaries still regard as reflexive but which are commonly used without the reflexive pronoun,³ for example: inmeng, spesialiseer - HAT maintains jou is optional in the latter case but I believe it is now archaic. Alternatively, where the Afrikaner does retain the reflexive pronoun in cases where English has too, nowadays it is commonly the emphatic form with -self that is used, even when no emphasis is implied (e.g. was or jouself was in preference to jou was). In each of these cases there is a distinct point of contact (raakpunt) between English and Afrikaans which has created in the mind of the bilingual a fuzzy area, to paraphrase Aitchison (1981: 52), which has enabled such shifts to occur, all the more so as the unemphatic reflexive pronoun is a relatively semantically empty particle anyway. (cf. 7.27.5)

2 Schonken (1914: 191) claims voel was also used in this way in seventeenth century Dutch.

3 To illustrate how remote dictionaries can be from reality and how Dutch oriented they still are at times, the Tweetalige Woordeboek of Bosman i.a. (1984) is so conservative as to give the infinitive of some reflexive verbs with sig (eg. verbeel), although the compilers have been rather inconsistent in this regard (eg. inmeng).

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Hasselmo (1961: 240) observed a similar phenomenon in his study of the language of Swedish immigrants in the USA:

‘... it may at least in some cases be more accurate to say that the English model has reinforced a tendency already found in the language than that it constitutes the sole source for the usage.’

Any two languages in contact can contain raakpunte which may give rise to interference. In the case in point, however, because the two languages are so closely related, there are all the more such points of contact which can even have a common etymology. The potential for influence is thus greatly increased and what is more, because the contact with Dutch has now become so tenuous, the way is open for linguistic change to occur, not merely interference.