The use of KAAPS in newspapers

Abstract

In the increasingly competitive media landscape newspapers, among others, are underpressure from digital and social media. As a result, the performance and positioningof traditional Afrikaans newspapers like Rapport, Beeld, Die Burger and Volksblad, aswell as the forms of Afrikaans they use, are constantly scrutinised in surveys about therelevance and profitability of the Afrikaans print media. These surveys often point tothe use of Afrikaans ‘as spoken by the people’ in emerging newspapers like Son andSon op Sondag, as the main reason for the growing popularity, healthy sales figuresand advertising revenue of these two newspapers. As a result, Son developed into thelargest Afrikaans daily in an Afrikaans print market long dominated by establishedtitles like Beeld, Die Burger and Volksblad. In view of this, this contribution will firstlyinvestigate the profitability (in monetary terms and circulation) of actually using Kaapsin newspapers. Secondly, it will focus attention on the use of this form of Afrikaansin traditional newspapers in which Standard Afrikaans is the dominant form. Thequestion is: What is the nature of the Kaaps in these newspapers compared to theKaaps in Son specifically? The aim of this contribution is to explore how Afrikaansnewspapers create space for the use of colloquial varieties in general and Kaapsspecifically, and to determine the relevance or function of Kaaps in the news domain.On the one hand the focus will be on columns in which Kaaps is the medium and onthe other, on newspaper articles about the Afrikaans language variety. The data onwhich this paper is based were firstly, the responses to a list of questions posed to thenews-editor of Son, and secondly a critical content analysis and interpretation of themanifestations of Kaaps in this newspaper in comparison to the forms in the moreestablished Afrikaans newspapers. The general perceptions of, and attitudes towards,the use of colloquial varieties of Afrikaans, collated in a 2012 survey among readers,are also taken into account.