Is there a Namibian Afrikaans? Recent trends in grammatical variation in Afrikaans varieties within and across Namibia's borders

Gerald Stell

doi:10.5842/39-0-76

Abstract

There has been a tradition of treating geographical factors and social structures as distinct variables in research on language variation within single speech communities, and as a result their mode of interaction has not yet been theorized (Britain 2002). At which point geography, in its human and physical dimensions, precedes or follows social structures in the configuration of language variation seems to depend on two potentially related factors, i.e. the strength or weakness of social network ties, as well as the propensity of a given society to maintain ethnic divides. Of interest here is how far a recent political border can geographically disrupt formerly homogeneous patterns of language variation within a single, yet ethnically divided speech community, and, conversely, how far a range of social factors co-defined by ethnicity can ensure the maintenance of linguistic homogeneity irrespective of new political configurations of space. Variation in has rarely been characterized in terms of the political border separating Namibia (formerly South West Africa or S.W.A.) and South Africa ever since Independence in 1990. Instead, the varieties spoken in S.W.A./Namibia have pretty much been regarded as a constellation of relocated South African varieties. It seems fair to assume that, up until Independence, these varieties had little sociolinguistic scope for diverging from their South African counterparts and that a state of continuum prevailed on account of greater freedom of movement across the border as well as similar degrees of exposure to prescriptive Standard through education. The main question we want to answer here is how much potential for disruption of that continuum, if it prevailed at all, has been brought about by Namibia's political border and its sociolinguistic implications, and whether that potential warrants the use of the label Namibian Afrikaans in reference to the varieties spoken in Namibia.

Highlights

There has been a tradition of treating geographical factors and social structures as distinct variables in research on language variation within single speech communities, and as a result their mode of interaction has not yet been theorized (Britain 2002)
How far has reduced exposure to Standard Afrikaans in Namibia brought about local dynamics of destandardization conducive to divergence from the South African varieties encompassed in those continua? Answering this question involves determining how the new social factor constituted by the political border interacts with ethnic factors, and how this interaction may or may not be in the process of bringing about a new linguistic boundary
The idea of a continuum within the Orange River Afrikaans variety (ORA) zone involving both Coloured and White varieties can be illustrated with the observation that older White and Coloured Namibian speakers use Type 4 before that feature subsides in the White sample

Summary

Introduction

There has been a tradition of treating geographical factors and social structures as distinct variables in research on language variation within single speech communities, and as a result their mode of interaction has not yet been theorized (Britain 2002). The main question we want to answer here is how much potential for disruption of that continuum, if it prevailed at all, has been brought about by Namibia's political border and its sociolinguistic implications, and whether that potential warrants the use of the label "Namibian Afrikaans" in reference to the Afrikaans varieties spoken in Namibia To answer this question, a corpus of informal speech involving three distinct age cohorts of native White and Coloured/Baster Afrikaans speakers has been collected across the Namibian-South African border with a view of identifying patterns of variation in the realization of a set of grammatical variables. 86 Gerald Stell section gives a historical and sociolinguistic account of Cape Dutch and Afrikaans in the geographic zone covered by Namibia's current territory This is followed by an overview of predictions on convergence and divergence between Afrikaans varieties across Namibia's borders that may seem justified by theoretical assumptions. Results confirming or disconfirming the idea of Namibian varieties of Afrikaans will be reviewed in the discussion

The origin and diffusion of Namibian Afrikaans varieties

Hypotheses regarding Namibian Afrikaans

The corpus

Distribution of grammatical variables in the corpus

Findings

Discussion