Afrikaans Speakers Research Articles

L2 activation during L1 processing is increased by exposure but decreased by proficiency

Aims: The study investigates the effects of L2 proficiency and L2 exposure on L2-to-L1 cross-language activation (CLA) in L1-dominant bilinguals. In so doing, it tests the predictions made by prominent models of the bilingual lexicon regarding how language experience modulates CLA. Design: The participants (27 L1-dominant L1 English–L2 Afrikaans speakers) completed a visual world eye-tracking task, conducted entirely in English, in which they saw four objects on a screen: a target object, which they were instructed to click on; a competitor object, whose Afrikaans label overlapped phonetically at onset with the English target object label; and two unrelated distractors. Language background data were collected using the Language History Questionnaire 3.0. Analysis: A growth curve analysis was performed to investigate the extent to which the background variables modulated looks to the Afrikaans competitor item versus to the two unrelated distractor items. Findings: Increased L2 exposure was associated with greater CLA, which is consistent with models suggesting that exposure modulates the likelihood and speed with which a linguistic item becomes activated. Moreover, CLA was reduced at higher levels of L2 proficiency, which aligns with accounts of the bilingual lexicon positing that parasitism of the L2 on the L1 is reduced at higher proficiency levels, leading to reduced CLA. Originality: L2 activation during L1 processing and the variables that modulate it are not well documented, particularly among L1 speakers with limited proficiency in and exposure to the L2. Significance: The findings contribute to the evaluation of competing accounts of bilingual lexical organization.

“fokkol graad vi jou nie” [Fuck All Degree for You]: Black Afrikaans Poets, Critical University Studies, and Transcripting the Afrikaans University

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of #Rhodesmustfall and calls for the decolonisation of the South African academy, #Afrikaansmustfall arose specifically targeting the continued use of Afrikaans as a language of teaching and learning. This article investigates the ways in which young, Black Afrikaans speakers – the often invisible members of the Afrikaans community – are critiquing and reimagining the hegemonic form of the Afrikaans language and university. The analysis centres on poems from the debut anthologies of Ashwin Arendse and Veronique Jephtas, namely Swatland (2021) and Soe Rond Ommie Bos (2021) – both of which are written in Kaaps, a non-standardised variant of Afrikaans. Critical university studies and James Scott’s notion of transcripts are the central frames through which the article speculates as to what a future form of the Afrikaans university, namely the African-Afrikaans university, could look like. The new script for this university includes being anti-racist, anti-neoliberal, and affective – whilst a concretely broadened form of Afrikaans grounds it.

Vanden vos Reynaerde se transformasie tot Reinaard die Jakkals

The legacy of the Middle Dutch epic Vanden vos Reynaerde and the many ways in which we still see traces of Reynaert the fox and his companion, Iesegrim the wolf, in Afrikaans, are discussed in this article. The indestructible fox gets a second life under the Southern Cross, perhaps most notably in the many tales about Jackal and Wolf which are well known as part of a shared oral heritage by white and Khoi speakers of Afrikaans. Our focus is not these stories, however, but rather the following question: does the Reynaert of the epic indeed live on in Afrikaans literature? We argue that the epic itself and its literary heritage has not received as much attention as did the stories of the sly jackal and the gullible, even dim-witted, wolf. These extremely short stories do not exhibit the carefully planned structure, sharp social commentary and ruthless exposing of human weaknesses as does the epic. In our opinion, the only text in which the medieval epic itself functions as intertext, is in the brilliant adaptation by Eitemal. Eitemal created a story which is in many ways so different from the Dutch Reinaert, that it truly is a story written on African soil. In the Eitemal text, the sly fox becomes a typical Afrikaans crook—and what’s more, he is a villain who is not foreign to modern readers due to his essentially human character. In Reinaard die Jakkals the intrepid, extremely cruel but also clever fox lives on.

Children’s acquisition of negation in L1 Afrikaans

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about through the reanalysis of a discourse-dependent (pragmatically conditioned) structure in Dutch, reinforced by proponents of the standardisation of Afrikaans who prescriptively imposed a negative concord structure onto the Dutch negation system. The Afrikaans negation system is therefore argued to be artificially created, making it crosslinguistically rare and syntactically complex, the latter possibly having a delaying effect on acquisition. This study investigates both the comprehension and production of negation by young child speakers of Afrikaans. Sentences containing negative indefinites (NIs) ( niks ‘nothing’ and geen ‘no’/ ‘none’ with a final negative particle) are compared with those containing two negative particles (referred to as SN), which are syntactically less complex. We examined (1) whether the comprehension of sentences with NIs is more difficult to acquire than that of sentences using SN and (2) when and how negation is produced by young children. Data were collected through a picture selection task (comprehension) and recordings of spontaneous speech during free play (production). Results show that the comprehension of SN was acquired before that of NI, indicating that sentences containing NIs were indeed more difficult to comprehend than those containing SN. The production data showed that even the youngest participants (age 3;0) could produce grammatically well-formed negated constructions, but that errors occurred until age 4;3. In comparison with that found for other West Germanic languages, Afrikaans’ complex system of expressing negation seems to have a delaying effect on the comprehension of negation, specifically NIs, but not on production.

Producing and perceiving socially structured coarticulation: Coarticulatory nasalization in Afrikaans

Most theories of phonetics assume a tight relation between production and perception, and recent years have also seen increasing evidence for such a relation at the level of the individual. For the most part, however, this evidence comes from socially homogeneous speech communities where the targeted pattern of variation is mostly socially neutral. What implications might socially structured phonetic variation in the speech community have for the perception-production link? If listeners can predict the phonetic patterns of a talker based on the talker’s actual or assumed identity, would they adjust their perceptual strategies accordingly, possibly weakening the link between their own production and perception patterns? This study reports the results of a pair of experiments that investigate the production and perception of coarticulatory vowel nasalization in Afrikaans, a language for which variation in coarticulatory nasalization is socially structured. Relying on nasal airflow measures, the production experiment showed that speakers of White Afrikaans produce more extensive coarticulatory nasalization than speakers of Kleurling Afrikaans. The perception experiment used an eye-tracking paradigm to assess listeners’ perceptual reliance on coarticulatory nasalization, and found (i) that Afrikaans speakers’ use of coarticulatory nasalization in production predicts their perceptual reliance on this information, (ii) that they rapidly adjust to the coarticulatory timing patterns in the speech of other speakers, but also (iii) that they do not adjust their perceptual reliance on coarticulation in response to the assumed identity of the speaker. The link between perception and production therefore persists, even in this situation of socially structured variation in coarticulatory timing.

Африкаанс и английский языки: языковая политика в системе образования Южной Африки

Purpose of work. The article examines the linguistic situation in modern South Africa after the end of Apartheid. One question is the importance of a concept of mother tongue education in the RSA. What difficulties Afrikaans speakers, mainly the Afrikaners and the Coloureds, have regarding the use of their mother tongue in education and how such challenges can be addressed; does this provide a basis for building a new common cultural, national identity. Materials and methods. The author analyzes several aspects and measures taken by the South African government, by universities and various public organizations in the sphere of education that affect the status and functioning of the Afrikaans language in modern conditions in order to determine the degree of their influence on the linguistic situation in the country. Results. The study showed that the measures taken by the government in the field of language policy, especially with regard to Afrikaans, are clearly at variance with the Constitution, guaranteeing the right to education in the mother tongue, Since the government’s goal is not to support Afrikaans and other language speakers in their desire to preserve linguistic identity, but to impose the English language, the minority language on the multilingual country, which in turn causes discontent among the Afrikaans speakers, that leads to the establishment of civil society organizations and movements for the defense of the mother tongue and the development of secessionist activities among Afrikaners and other linguistic communities among the country. Conclusion. Based on the facts provided, the author concludes that without joint efforts and cohesion of the Afrikaners and the Coloureds, without a shared perception of their linguistic and cultural identity, Afrikaans in the long run will simply become just a home language with further complete and utter oblivion.

"dit en dat" en "al daai goed": 'n Korpuslinguistiese ondersoek na pragmatiese merkers in gesproke Afrikaans

Pragmatiese merkers is 'n frekwente verskynsel van gesproke taal. Daar is egter nog baie min studies onderneem na pragmatiese merkers in Omgangsafrikaans. Pragmatiese merkers tree op as belangrike kontekstualiseringswenke deurdat dit gespreksgenote rig in terme van die relevansie van die uiting, en die spreker in staat stel om, op bondige wyse, 'n houding teenoor die proposisie van die uiting te openbaar. In hierdie studie word gefokus op 'n bepaalde tipe pragmatiese merker, naamlik vaekategoriemerkers (VKM's). Vaekategoriemerkers in Afrikaans is 'n meerwoordige leksikale eenheid, of woordkluster, wat as pragmatiese merker optree, byvoorbeeld "en goed" en "of iets". Hierdie ondersoek het ten doel om aan die hand van korpuslinguistiese metodes te bepaal watter vaekategoriemerkers in Omgangsafrikaans gebruik word en watter pragmatiese funksies dit verrig.

Sound Patterns as Connectors: An Experimental Production of Three Sisters

The actor is tasked with embodying text in order to portray the characters’ intentions. This article shows that such a complex task escalates when the actor performs in a second language. In South Africa, where eleven official languages are embraced, the multiplicity and crossover of spoken languages is a daily challenge for actors and theatre makers, leading to a preference for physical performances, which limits the use of text. The production of embodied sound patterns embedded in a text informed the creative process of an experimental production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. It was created with a second-language cast (speakers of Setswana and Afrikaans) whose over-arching goal was to consider the embodied patterns of pre-linguistic expression as a theatre-making tool. When reflecting on their work, the actors indicated that their explorations facilitated a connection with the text in English and generated the relevant dynamics for the play’s sociopolitical themes to be adequately ‘translated’ to a contemporary multilingual South African context. Karina Lemmer is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Performing Arts at Tshwane University of Technology in Gauteng, where she teaches acting and voice. She has directed a number of multilingual productions, including Buried Voices (2018) and Motlotlegi (2019), and has published in the Voice and Speech Review (2018).

Promoting multilingualism: Foundation Phase teachers’ experiences in teaching isiXhosa to native speakers of Afrikaans

After 1994, South African policy changes brought about variations in language education resulting in many monolingual classrooms becoming multilingual. Much of the current literature focuses on either providing recommendations to diverse approaches of teaching a second language or describing the experiences of second language learners while limited studies unearthed teachers’ experiences in multilingual classrooms, especially where the language of learning and teaching (LoLT) was Afrikaans. In this article we examine responses of teachers in the Northern Cape to teaching isiXhosa to learners whose mother-tongue is Afrikaans. From an interpretivist lens and using a case study design, we present 6 Afrikaans Foundation Phase teachers’ (FPTs) experiences in teaching isiXhosa as a second First Additional Language (FAL) to non-isiXhosa speakers. Data from in-depth email interviews were coded and thematically analysed. The results from this study show that, while teachers regard multilingualism as fundamental, they equally regard the isiXhosa curriculum as a tool to develop learners’ language proficiency.

Idioms in intercultural communication

Abstract This paper combines central ideas from Intercultural Pragmatics and Cultural Linguistics to rethink an issue that has been amply discussed in various branches of linguistics: idioms, ‘phrasemes,’ and other forms of fixed-form figurative language, when used in intercultural communication (ICC). It argues that an interaction-oriented approach needs to think beyond the description and mapping of idioms in different languages and cultures, and apply both pragmatic and cognitive linguistic approaches to explain if and how idiomatic language works (or does not work) in ICC. Methodologically, this paper relies on a combination of empirical approaches. A data-inductive analysis of authentic intercultural discourse involving native speakers of German, Afrikaans, and Zulu, who use English as a lingua franca in a project management setting provides interesting real-life examples of the pragmatic aspects of idiomatic language in authentic ICC. The results of this pragmalinguistic analysis have inspired and are accompanied by a deductive-experimental study, using questionnaires for speakers of various native languages (Arabic, German, Russian, Spanish, Turkish), testing the cross-linguistic communicability of English idioms in a ‘laboratory setting.’ These experiments show that an appreciation of both the embodied and empractic-interactional dimensions of idioms promises insights into how figurative language and fixed-form expressions are used successfully or unsuccessfully in ICC and why.

When roles within interpreter-mediated psychiatric consultations speak louder than words.

In South Africa, clinicians working in public psychiatric hospitals are mainly fluent in English and Afrikaans, while the majority of patients are not proficient in these languages. Due to a lack of professional interpreting services, informal, ad hoc interpreters are commonly employed in public psychiatric hospitals. We collected data on language practices in public psychiatric care in South Africa, and provide a detailed account of what happens when bilingual health care workers and cleaners haphazardly take on the additional role of interpreter. Data were collected during 2010 at a public psychiatric hospital in the Western Cape, South Africa. Thirteen interpreter-mediated psychiatric consultations were video-recorded, and 18 audio-recorded semi-structured interviews were conducted with the interpreters and clinicians who participated in the interpreter-mediated psychiatric consultations. Patients were proficient in isiXhosa (one of the 11 official languages of South Africa), the clinicians (all registrars) were first language English or Afrikaans speakers, while the health care workers (nurses and social workers) and cleaners were fluent in both the patients' and clinician's language. Our findings suggest that interpreters took on the following four roles during the interpreter-mediated psychiatric consultations: regulating turn-taking, cultural broker, gatekeeper and advocate. Our findings suggest that, despite interpreters and clinicians having the patient's best interests at heart, it is the patient's voice that becomes lost while the clinician and interpreter negotiate the roles played by each party.

White identity development at the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) from 1965-1968 through the use of language and religion

The primary goal in the establishment of RAU in 1968 was the educational advancement of the white Afrikaans speaker on the Witwatersrand. A secondary goal was the development of white Afrikaans identity in higher education through the use of the Afrikaans language and Christian religion. This was done by means of academic and scientific programmes. The Afrikaner culture in its entirety had to be nurtured. Although the RAU, for the majority of white Afrikaans speakers, represented a momentous time in terms of its creation history and architectural design it also had its main aim the moulding of a new modern Afrikaans identity. The perceived struggling “Boer” – “proletarian” and working class character of the white Afrikaans speaker had to make way for an emerging middle class: modern and sophisticated. In this article, light is shed on the role of especially language and religion in developing a modern white Afrikaans identity at RAU, later renamed the University of Johannesburg.

Unravelling Pretville (Korsten, 2012) and encountering Marikana: The superfluous cheer of the Afrikaner volksiel

Drawing on the thought of Achille Mbembé and Jacques Rancière, I observe the spatiotemporal proximity of the Marikana massacre and the production of an Afrikaans musical called Pretville (‘Funville’), attempting to understand the intricate dialectics of othering. I specifically consider the persistence of this mechanism in the ‘Afrikaner volksiel’, a metaphysical construct ostensibly uniting white Afrikaans speakers. To this end, I contextualize Pretville within the larger Afrikaner cultural project before maintaining that the text exhibits a fervent forgetfulness of the South African socio-political landscape. It is thus an aporetic text in that it deconstructs itself through the presences implied in their very invisibility, particularly the present-absence of the racialized labour exploitation buttressing an affluent neo-liberal society. I conclude that, through this entanglement, the world of Marikana is inseparable from the world of Pretville.

Afrikaans

Of the official languages of South Africa, Afrikaans has the widest geographical, demographic and racial distribution (Webb 2003). According to the latest South African census of 2011 (StatsSA 2012), Afrikaans as first language is spoken by 13.5% of the country's inhabitants, only surpassed in numbers by Zulu (22.7%) and Xhosa (16%). In neighbouring Namibia, 10.4% of the population has Afrikaans as their first language. A noteworthy number of recent emigrants to United Kingdom, Australia, Europe and North America are likely to be Afrikaans speakers as well.1 A handful of elderly persons in Patagonia still speak Afrikaans; they are descendants of some 600 Afrikaans speakers who settled in Patagonia at the beginning of the 20th century (Du Toit 1995, Coetzee et al. 2018).

Norme vir huidiglik

Norms of huidiglik. In Afrikaans, huidiglik is a truly Janus-faced word: it is being used with high frequency in especially spoken language, while at the same time being one of the biggest language pet-peeves of language practitioners (and even ordinary speakers of Afrikaans). When asked why huidiglik should be avoided, these language practitioners and language users often cannot provide any reasoning about it. A comprehensive literature review also reveals that linguists and language practitioners often give contradictory, or even linguistically incorrect reasons for why huidiglik is supposedly not acceptable in (standard) Afrikaans. By comparing a variety of normative grammaticographic sources (such as reference guides and prescriptive grammars), this article shows that: (1) huidiglik originated, on a balance of probability, in the 1970s in the South African Parliament; and (2) apart from stylistic preferences (e.g. that it sounds pretentious, feigned and affectatious), none of the linguistic arguments against huidiglik holds water. In a supplementary article in this issue of the journal it is being illustrated that huidiglik is alive and well in written (Standard) Afrikaans.

Die ontwikkeling van [ʃ] in Afrikaans

The development of [ʃ] in Afrikaans. This is a follow-up study on a seemingly recent development of the consonant system of Afrikaans that Wissing, Pienaar and Van Niekerk (2015) reported on. They show that the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ is produced as the [ʃ], a voiceless postalveolar or alveopalatal fricative when immediately following the rhotic /r/, but as [s] in contexts other than this. To establish whether this phenomenon is characteristic of present-day Afrikaans in contrast to the pronunciation of previous generations, a survey was conducted in which the readings of news bulletins by two groups of radio presenters were analysed regarding their acoustic properties. These groups are representative of two generations of Afrikaans speakers, characterised as Oud [Old] and Jonk [Young]. Apart from the fact that the reading by Oud were recorded one to two decades ago (2000–2006), and those by Jonk during 2017, the average ages of these groups were at the time of recording 29 years for Jonk, and 50 years for Oud. A significant difference between the acoustic properties of the fricative /s/ following /r/ of these two groups was found. More specifically, Jonk, unlike Oud, clearly produced this phoneme as [ʃ]. This shows that notable sound shifts might happen within a relatively short time span. The article is concluded by considering a possible explanation of this recent phenomenon within the realm of theories of internal sound change.

Afrikaans stories of Jackal and Hyena: Oral and written traditions

This paper scrutinizes two wild relatives of dogs, namely jackals and hyenas, who feature prominently in Afrikaans children’s literature by way of African oral tradition, specifically Khoi oral literature. The stories of Jakkals (Jackal) and Wolf (Hyena) illustrate the ways in which Khoi orature found its way into Afrikaans (children’s) literature in a gradual process culminating in appropriation. The paper shows how Afrikaans literary scholars charted this process and what mechanisms they employed to diminish the role played by the original Khoi storytellers—a denial of the context in which the stories were created that persists until today. Apart from reference to a separate oral tradition of Jackal and Hyena stories that developed amongst white Afrikaans speakers, the specific focus of the paper is on the Afrikaans animal tales published by G. R. von Wielligh since all later publications by other authors draw on the Von Wielligh stories to an extent. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research that departs from outmoded approaches to African oral literature.

Eenders en anders: Die leksikons van Afrikaans en Nederlands in die een-en-twintigste eeu —’n loodsstudie

Early research into the Afrikaans vocabulary was mainly diachronic and comparative (Dutch being the “mother” language from which Afrikaans developed) and the relationship between the lexicons of the two languages was not explored in any great detail towards the end of the twentieth century. This state of affairs changed with the publication of Groot Woordeboek Afrikaans en Nederlands (“Great Dictionary Afrikaans and Dutch”) in 2011, a dictionary with an amalgamated lemma list. One of the outcomes of the lexicographic project was the realisation that less than fifty percent of the lemmas in the dictionary were absolute cognates, words which are similar in both form and meaning. This finding prompted a synchronic comparison of word forming processes in Afrikaans and Dutch, using two small newspaper corpora from 2009 as well a selection of neologisms. Analysis of the data shows that although Afrikaans and Dutch differ in the way in which loan words are incorporated—Dutch speakers prefer to take over the words as they are, whereas Afrikaans speakers make use of calques— the morphosemantic process of compounding is still the most productive way for adding words to the lexicon. The two languages do not make use of each others’ coinages, one indication that their lexicons are increasingly growing apart.

Die slag toe slim sy baas gevang het

The day when the clever arguments misfired. Some very interesting observations can be made in describing the history of the standardising of Afrikaans. It is possible that the plans that Lord Milner had in mind for the establishing of an exclusive English language in South Africa during the early years of the twentieth century could be the starting point of Afrikaans as an official language some two decades later. Afrikaans was a well-known spoken language by 1910. It started with the Khoi, using their language as a base, and then adapting the language of the seafarers on the Dutch ships, which they construed as a new trade language: Afrikaans. This language later became one of the main languages of the central parts of South Africa. The sheep and cattle farmers from the interior spoke a language that was far removed from Dutch as well. These two Afrikaans dialects were not used for higher functions, and they influenced each other to a great extent. The tradition among speakers of Afrikaans of using Dutch whenever the written functions of Dutch were required was one of the main deterrents for broadening the scope of Afrikaans. Dutch was used in the public schools with little success, largely due to Dutch not being a home language for the Afrikaans scholars attending those schools. In fact, Dutch was hardly a spoken language in South Africa, but it was a language with well-established higherfunctions, which Afrikaans lacked. In this context, the use of Dutch in schools prevented mother-tongue speakers of Afrikaans’ education in their mother tongue. Emphasising the need for Afrikaans as a medium of instruction for Afrikaans-speaking pupils,Langenhoven used some clever arguments to gain the support in 1914 of the Dutch-oriented South African Academy for Language, Literature and Art (Zuid-Afrikaansche Akademie voor Taal, Letteren en Kunst) for his plan to introduce Afrikaans as a language of choice in the public schools where Dutch was taught as well. Rather unexpectedly, the Academy supported his plan. It appears that Langenhoven struck a deal with the pro-Dutch language association, the ZuidAfrikaansche Taalbond, beforehand, which left the Afrikaans language commission no other option but to use Dutch spelling rules to spell Afrikaans. The direct outcome of this arrangement is discussed here, as well as some of the consequences following from it.

Plosive voicing in Afrikaans: Differential cue weighting and tonogenesis

This study documents the relation between f0 and prevoicing in the production and perception of plosive voicing in Afrikaans. Acoustic data show that Afrikaans speakers differed in how likely they were to produce prevoicing to mark phonologically voiced plosives, but that all speakers produced large and systematic f0 differences after phonologically voiced and voiceless plosives to convey the contrast between the voicing categories. This pattern is mirrored in these same participants’ perception: although some listeners relied more than others on prevoicing as a perceptual cue, all listeners used f0 (especially in the absence of prevoicing) to perceptually differentiate historically voiced and voiceless plosives. This variation in the speech community is shown to be generationally structured such that older speakers were more likely than younger speakers to produce prevoicing, and to rely on prevoicing perceptually. These patterns are consistent with generationally determined differential cue weighting in the speech community and with an ongoing sound change in which the original consonantal voicing contrast is being replaced by a tonal contrast on the following vowel.