Fanakalo as a mining language in South Africa: A new overview

Abstract

Abstract Fanakalo pidgin rose to prominence when it was selected for use as the lingua franca of the highly multilingual mines of South Africa. This article examines the properties of Fanakalo as a mining language, in contrast to its uses on farms, suburban households and in urban employment. Fanakalo has evolved a special register of technical terms pertaining to the mining industry from various sources (chiefly Zulu, English and Afrikaans). This article characterizes lexical innovations in this mining register and corrects previous estimates of the sources of innovation by differentiating the major parts of speech. The article also draws attention to the complexity of Fanakalo in pamphlets put out by mining management, in sharp contrast to the more usual kind of Fanakalo documented in earlier sources. As far as mining language policy is concerned, there have been calls in the last few decades to discontinue its use on the mines on the grounds of its associations with colonial and racial domination. Whereas Fanakalo has been invariably denigrated by intellectuals as a language of oppression rather than culture, there have been some surprising recent developments. In the wake of the tragedy at Marikana mines in 2012, where 34 workers on strike were shot and killed by police, Fanakalo has come to prominence as the language preferred by the strikers for mass meetings and negotiations with management. This process offers possibilities of the linguistic elaboration of the pidgin and raises questions about possible creolization.