There’s a rather minor movement, with which I comply, to spell Afrika with a K. I’ve written about this previously on here but I can’t find it. I have certain issues with it because it doesn’t seem entirely coherent to me. The claim is that no native Afrikan language spells it with a C, and therefore to do so is colonialist. There’s a similar argument applied to the spelling of Mexico with an X or a J, which incidentally even extends to Texas/Tejas. However, since there are several native Afrikan scripts which don’t even have these letters, and other non-Latin scripts used there which lack them too, the very use of the Latin alphabet to write the name of the continent could be seen as imperialist since it’s originally a European alphabet. But there’s another more complicated issue, which at first seems very different to how it turns out to be on closer examination: the Afrikaans language.
Certainly to me in the 1980s, and I presume also to others who were involved in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Afrikaans language, which first arose in South Africa before it actually was South Africa among the White invaders in I think the eighteenth century, symbolises White imperialism and the oppression of the indigenous people. Now I’ve never been to South Africa so I’m talking about this from a great distance conceptually and geographically, but one of the notable things Afrikaans does orthographically is to spell “Afrika” with a K. Therefore you have a situation where Francophone Black Afrikans spell it with a Q and Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Black Afrikans spell it with a C. Swahili does spell it with a K. In Namibia, the Küchendeutsch spoken there also spells it with a K. Hence the Germanic languages spoken in Southern Afrika, both of which could be seen as colonial interlopers, use a K. But it’s not that simple.
It’s probably worth briefly sketching the nature of Afrikaans before I go on. Afrikaans is probably the easiest of all foreign languages for a first language Scots or English speaker to learn. It would presumably be even easier for a Dutch speaker because it could be argued to be merely Dutch. The irony for an Ingvaeonic language speaker such as myself (Scots, Yola, English, Frisian, Tok Pisin and some other creoles) is that it’s probably easier to speak and understand Afrikaans than even the more closely related Frisian, because the process of creolisation simplifies grammar in the same direction as English, which may also be a creole (Danish-Anglosaxon), has evolved. Hence the oft-quoted sentence “my pen is in my hand”, which is the same in English and Afrikaans, though differently pronounced. Two notable features of Afrikaans are that it’s simplified Dutch and that its grammar is practically analytical – it expresses ideas with separate words which don’t change much. The verbs are, as a rule, even simpler than in English, lacking the strong conjugations we have with verbs such as “drive” and “take”. It isn’t the same language as Dutch though, because although Dutch people could understand Afrikaans speakers with ease, the reverse isn’t true because of the more inflected grammar.
However, Afrikaans is not purely Dutch. It also borrows from Malay because of the Malay community in the Cape colony, who were not in fact always Malay but used the bafflingly easy Malay language as a lingua franca. I don’t know much about the history of Malay, but its simplicity, though shared with many other Austronesian languages, is so extreme that I wonder if it has itself become creolised at some point.
Afrikaans was originally a pidgin spoken between the Dutch invaders and the San and Bantu people of the Cape which is said to have evolved within a generation of the Dutch arriving there because of the use of Bantu and San house servants to care for White children. Quite remarkably, in spite of its external image as the language of the White Apartheid régime, the majority of Afrikaans speakers are non-White: 60% in fact. It’s spoken mainly in the west of the country, and it’s also spoken in a small town in Kenya called Eldoret, which was founded by Afrikaners. Outside Afrika, Australia is the country with the most speakers. It’s given English a few words, including “aardvark”, “aardwolf” and “veldt”, and South African English, unsurprisingly, has considerably more. Unsurprisingly, it has borrowed from Khoisan and Bantu languages but also from Portuguese. The Oorlams dialect, spoken in Namibia, even has clicks, since ethnically they are descended mainly from the San. This probably means, though I haven’t tested it, that there are two completely separate sources of clicks in that dialect. In the fairly closely related German, clicks occur as allophones weakly between words ending in T and words beginning with K within phrases, and this seems to happen in English too, so it can be expected to happen in Afrikaans. More on the possible connection with Khoisan later.
It’s said to be a myth that the language was ever majority White, connected to the idea of White settlers “civilising” the area. The earliest written records use Arabic script and were written in a madrasa, again bringing it closer to Malay. The Cape Malays in fact used Afrikaans extensively. Due to White Afrikaner nationalism, Afrikaans was portrayed as a purely Germanic language. It was famously used as a weapon in 1974 when it was imposed as a medium of education, which led to the Soweto uprising, and this further stigmatised and polarised the language as belonging to Whites.
As a foreigner, one thing that strikes me about the language is that it seems to have greater contact with the San community than with speakers of Bantu languages. Afrikaans is in a sense a Khoisan language, as fifty percent of them speak it. Ethnically, that’s substantially where it belongs, and I suspect this shows in its structure. Bantu languages are grammatically quite complex and heavily inflected. There’s a large number of noun classes, nouns are inflected using prefixes and verbs are conjugated for subject and object. Khoisan languages are very different, although they may not be closely related to each other at all, which may reflect the extremely ancient heritage of the San. They have more consonants than any other spoken languages and it’s as if all the meaning and energy is piled into these sounds, because grammatically they’re isolating. The Bantu language Swahili, spoken well outside South Africa, has many Arabic words and inflects them as if they’re native. Had Bantu languages been a strong influence on Afrikaans, it could be expected to do similar things to the language as Swahili has done to words of Arabic origin, but it doesn’t. Most creoles, with the exception of one spoken in Canada, simplify grammar, so it’s hard to disentangle, but the isolating nature of Khoisan languages seems to me to be a possible candidate for their influence on Afrikaans, and I suspect that White Afrikaans speakers would have preferred to have thought that their language was White when in fact the influence of the San is clear in the grammatical structure.
What I don’t understand, probably because of my ignorance of South African history, is why Khoisan seems to have been so much more influential on the language than Bantu. Even Malay seems to have more sway over it. Anyone wiser than I willing to give an explanation?
A Box Of Chocolates 