The Influence of English on Afrikaans

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Chapter Eight

8.0 Conclusion and perspectives for further research

8.1 Conclusion

The reaction of those sceptics who do not regard the influence English has had so far on Afrikaans as now being integral to the very nature of the language and who thus presumably regard some of the tenets presented in this book as unacceptable, reminds one of the reaction of Afrikaners to Changuion's publication in 1844 where he suggested that plat Kaapsch was not only the mother-tongue of Hottentots and slaves. Nienaber (1950: 22) describes the conflict that confronted the Afrikaner at the time as follows:

‘Dan ontstaan 'n toestand van gespannenheid: aan die een kant die werklikheid, aan die ander kant die tradisie en ou ideaal.’

The situation with regard to the degree of English influence in Afrikaans today resembles in some ways that example from nineteenth century Cape society.

If even scholars are unable to ascertain precisely what an anglicism is and what is indigenous in Afrikaans, what hope does the layman, the true custodian of the language, have? The answer is obviously no hope, but more importantly, does it matter? He, like the native-speaker of English in South Africa, should be made to feel linguistically secure enough to trust his own ear. His ear will be guided by usage, regardless of etymology and displacement of indigenous structures. Etymology would then be as irrelevant to acceptability in Afrikaans as it is in English. But it will be difficult to instil such confidence in Afrikaners as long as the main prescriptive works for which he reaches in time of doubt, are so totally remote from the everyday reality of the Afrikaans-English contact situation and continue to cling to Diets structures which, however desirable they may be from a puristic point of view, are not rooted in the reality of the spoken language. That reality is the only thing the average native-speaker is sure of, but at present he is impeded from relying on it.

The speech community has already unequivocally decided on many of the examples given in my corpus. It is time for prescriptive bodies and works to take note of this and accept these de facto decisions, even if they mean that standard Afrikaans will now deviate even more from Dutch and come closer to English; normalising bodies are at the moment inhibiting the

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natural development of the language more than is usually the case with languages. I sincerely hope that this work will succeed in pumping new life into the ongoing polemic about anglicisms and perhaps usher in a new era in the way many of them are regarded. A change in attitude is urgent because, as I have attempted to illustrate, Afrikaans is in the process of becoming more and more a translated language and it is a tide which cannot and will not be turned. This metamorphosis, which is occurring as ever more English idiom is being dressed up in Diets vocabulary, is apparently the inevitable product of the unique bilingual situation that exists today in the Republic of South Africa.