| Afrikaans an African language? |
Tom McLachlan
In her response to the discussion between Gerrit Brand and Suzy Bell, Gina Shepherd makes this remark in parenthesis: "We should also not forget that essentially Afrikaans is an African language!" I am not quite sure why she throws in this remark, which has the appearance of a non sequitur, especially in view of her comments about the Afrikaans of Brink and Matthee. It cannot be, therefore, that she would need translators to gain access to Afrikaans literature.
Nevertheless, I beg to differ. Afrikaans is NOT essentially an African language, in any case not in the sense that that expression is currently used in South Africa. For obvious reasons, South African African-language speakers and linguists avoid the linguistic term Bantu languages, which is widely used abroad. (About two years ago, at a seminar on the standardisation of African languages held at the University of Pretoria, Dr Marcel Diki-Kidiri, a prominent linguist from the Central African Republic, was utterly astonished when a South African member of the audience questioned his use of the term Bantu languages.)
Afrikaans may be regarded by some as an African language because it is spoken on the African continent, but then so would be Arabic, French, Portuguese or English. It seems, furthermore, to have become politically correct, and some Afrikaans groupings may regard it as strategically wise, to refer to Afrikaans as one of South Africa’s indigenous (ie African) languages.
That does not change the linguistic-genealogical fact, however, that Afrikaans is a full-blooded member of the West Germanic branch of the Germanic family of languages, as is English.
Yes, Afrikaans evolved in Africa, it has absorbed a certain (relatively small) number of Bantu, Malay and other lexical items into its vocabulary, and in the last decade or two it has shown increased English influence at the syntactic and idiomatic levels.
Essentially, however, Afrikaans remains a West Germanic language. To change its linguistic-genealogical classification to an African language (whatever that may be), would be the same as saying that SA English is an African language, or Australian English is an Aboriginal language, or West Indian English is an Amerindian language.
Tom McLachlan
Pretoria
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