9.6. AFRIKAANS
Controversy about the development of Afrikaans has been
sharper than for any other putative Creole, largely (apparently) for
poUtical reasons. The extreme positions are these: (a) Afrikaans devel-
oped out of Dutch exclusively through internally-motivated changes
of a type found in Dutch dialects of Europe and/or in other Germanic
languages; and (b) Afrikaans is a Creole, the result of relexification of
a Portuguese-based Creole with, maybe, some influence from Hotten-
tot (i.e., Khoisan), Malay, and other languages spoken in and around
Cape Town during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Between
these two extremes are various intermediate positions, such as the
view that Afrikaans is a semi-creole which arose partly through inter-
nally-motivated changes in Dutch but partly through influence from
other South African languages. We have not carried out independent
study either of the linguistic features of Afrikaans or of its social
history; our comments on the case therefore rest entirely on second-
ary sources. We offer them here for their possible methodological
252 CASE STUDIES
value. In particular, it seems to us that the published social and
linguistic facts about Afrikaans have not been sufficiently studied
together, as a package, to see what conclusion best fits them. This
case study is based on an unpubHshed section of the original version
of Thomason (1980^).
Certainly Afrikaans seems at first glance to be an unlikely candi-
date for Creole status, because the socially dominant core of its speech
community is now, and always has been, the descendants of the
original Dutch settlers at Cape Town after its founding in 1652. The
Dutch colonists could reasonably have been expected to pass their
language on to their descendants in a continuous unbroken process
of normal transmission, in sharp contrast to, say, the transmission
of Portuguese by Portuguese slavemasters to enslaved Africans.
However, Valkhoff s careful study (1966) of the external history of
Afrikaans shows that the process of transmission of Dutch in the
Cape Colony was not as clear-cut as one might have assumed. Our
sketch of this history is based on Valkhoffs account.
Two major factors compHcate the picture. First, chronologically
speaking, is the fact that few Dutch women accompanied the first
Dutch settlers to Cape Town. A natural consequence of this situation
was that, in the first twenty years of the Cape Colony, some 75
percent of the children born to female slaves were fathered by Dutch
colonists (Valkhoff, 206). (Valkhoff refers to documentary evidence
that refutes "the persistent legend" — fostered, by implication, by
Afrikaners who hated the idea of miscegenation — "that the Cape
Coloured had been begotten only by passing sailors, not by the
White colonists themselves" [75].) Now, the slaves were Asian and
would have been speaking a Portuguese-based Creole and/or Malay,
and the Dutch, according to Valkhoff, would also have known Por-
tuguese and/or Portuguese Creole. Nevertheless, the language passed
on to these children- — ^whose descendants later formed the Cape Col-
oured community — -was a form of speech with Dutch vocabulary.
Valkhoffs claim is that the Dutch learned by the children must
have been very heavily influenced by Portuguese Creole in particu-
lar — that, in effect, the transmission process was not normal, since
the children's slave mothers would have spoken at best broken Dutch.
Valkhoff estimates that 45 percent of the nearly four million current
(as of 1966) speakers of Afrikaans are coloureds, which means that
the coloureds' influence on the further development of Dutch in
^CASE STUDIES 253
feouth Africa could have been considerable if the early proportions
[bf coloureds to whites were similar.
Meanwhile, the second complicating factor entered the picture
Once white famiHes settled in numbers in the Cape Colony. It was
common practice for Dutch mothers in southern Africa and the East
Indies to turn over the duties of bringing up their children to servants.
From these servants the children learned both Portuguese Creole and
Dutch but, according to an eighteenth-century German traveler
named Kolbe, the servants' poor command of Dutch meant that the
children were learning "from the outset a very pitiful Dutch" (cited
by Valkhoff, 176). By 1685, high officials of the Dutch East India
Company were expressing fears that the broken Dutch which had
become estabHshed, especially among White children, "would prove
to be ineradicable" (209). In this way, Valkhoff beHeves, Portuguese
Creole (and perhaps also Hottentot, whose speakers were prized as
interpreters for their linguistic skills) interference features found their
way into the Dutch of South Africa.
The transmission process, as Valkhoff describes it, would have
been bent rather than broken in the early years of Cape Colony
Dutch. Valkhoff points to the "advanced" (i.e., more creole-like)
Afrikaans of certain subgroups of the coloureds as evidence of col-
oured participation in the process; he also remarks on the continued
influence of High Dutch on Afrikaans as spoken by whites. Some
recent comments by Hans den Besten (personal communication,
1984), however, indicate that the distinction between the Afrikaans
of coloureds and the Afrikaans of whites is by no means so simple.
White farmhands in the West Cape, he observes, speak the same type
of Afrikaans that West Cape Coloureds speak— a dialect which is,
moreover, hard for Afrikaners from the East Cape to understand,
thanks primarily to several sound changes that have occurred in West
Cape Afrikaans. He also points out that the high "bookish" style of
spoken Afrikaans is relatively easy for Dutch speakers to understand,
while the "deep," or colloquial, register of spoken Afrikaans is very
difficult for Dutch speakers to follow.
When we look at the linguistic features of Afrikaans, we find no
obviously marked features from any language other than Dutch. One
possible exception to this generahzation is the double negative mark-
er, which den Besten (1985) suggests as a Khbisan interference fea-
ture. Another possible exception is the development of nasaUzed
254 CASE STUDIES
vowels, e.g., ons [5:s] Ve, us' (Lockwood 1965:208), which could
have arisen under Portuguese influence. We also find more marked
features of Dutch grammar in Afrikaans than we find from the vocab-
ulary-base language in any languages that are uncontroversially
classed as Creoles; even possible semi-creoles such as Reunion Creole,
which might have as much French grammar as Afrikaans has Dutch
grammar, also have features from substrate languages in addition to
their French features. The information we give below about Afrikaans
structure comes from Lockwood (1964:208 ff.)
A number of phonological changes from Dutch to Afrikaans
simplify the phonological inventory. An example is the loss of voiced
fricatives through merger with their voiceless counterparts.
Morphological simplification has occurred to some extent in nom-
inal inflection and to a great extent in verb inflection. Nouns and
plural personal pronouns lack case distinctions, though singular per-
sonal pronouns retain the Dutch distinction between the subject and
object cases. In verbs, Dutch itself has a more analytic system than
some other Germanic languages, such as German; but Afrikaans has
lost all personal endings and much of the tense system, so it is much
more analytic even than Dutch. The Dutch preterite has been lost
except in auxiliaries, and the original perfect has become the ordinary
Afrikaans past tense (cf., analogous changes in French, southern
German, Yiddish, Italian, etc.). The past participle is now derived
from the present stem, and Afrikaans has entirely lost the characteris-
tic Germanic distinction between strong and weak verbs. Among
Lockwood's examples (210) are these: ek, ons (etc.) skryf% we (etc.)
write'; ek, ons (etc.) het geskryf % we (etc.) wrote, have written'.
Lockwood (210) says that the loss of Dutch structure has not impov-
erished the expressive possibilities of Afrikaans, because new verbal
constructions have developed, e.g., a periphrastic progressive aspect
construction: ek was aan die skryf'I was writing' (literally 'I was on
the write').
The syntax of Afrikaans, according to Lockwood, is similar to
that of Dutch. The main innovations he mentions are the double
negative and a few Malay features, e.g., a reduplication process. The
lexicon is mainly Dutch, though there are numerous English loan-
words; there are also a few Malay loanwords and some African words
for "purely African objects and conditions" (210 f.).
CASE STUDIES 255
Opponents of Hesseling's original suggestion (1897, 1923) (and
of Valkhoff s, following Hesseling) that Afrikaans arose by (semi-)
creolization with "Malayo-Portuguese" are assiduous in their efforts
to identify all features of Afrikaans with dialect developments in
European Dutch. But many of these identifications are of dubious
historical value, since they do not occur in clusters in one or more
dialects that can be shown to have been spoken in the Cape Colony
during the formative period of Afrikaans. That is: it is not enough
to show that a particular change is a possible development in a Dutch
dialect; in order to connect a feature of Afrikaans with a particular
dialect feature in Holland or Belgium, one must show that speakers
of the relevant European dialects were present at the relevant time in
sufficient numbers to have influenced the development. Such a dem-
onstration will be most convincing, moreover, when it involves the
development of arguably marked features. In any case, the drastic
inflectional simplifications and consequent remodelling of Dutch
structures in Afrikaans are not typical, as a set of changes, of any
European Dutch dialect or dialect group. To argue that Afrikaans
arose by a series of perfectly ordinary internally motivated changes
from Dutch flies in the face of everything we know about ordinary
rates of internally-motivated change. We do not suggest that we can
specify precise rates of change, but rather that the changes from
Dutch to Afrikaans, apparently during the early years of the Cape
Colony, were much too extensive to have arisen solely by internal
means in the elapsed time. However, as we observed above, they
show little positive interference from any other languages, as far as
we can tell; nor are Afrikaans structures similar in detail to structures
of most abrupt Creoles with European lexicons.
Neither the social situation nor the linguistic facts, therefore,
seem to support a claim that Afrikaans is a Creole in origin. Both sets
of facts do support the claim that speakers of other languages shifted
to Dutch in the years following the founding of Cape Town, and
that the children of Dutch fathers and, later, of Dutch mothers and
fathers learned a form of Dutch that was significantly different from
the Dutch spoken natively by adult Dutch settlers. The essence of
the difference appears to lie in the simplification of the inflectional
systems, and the (concomitant?) emergence of analytic constructions
to take the place of certain inflectional features that were lost. In
256 CASE STUDIES
terms of our framework, this looks like a failure to learn the most
difficult features of the target language during a process of language
shift, if one is willing to accept the Dutch children's "bad Dutch" as
the first stage in the TL population's acceptance of the shifting speak-
ers' errors. The absence of many accompanying interference features
from adult learners' original native languages is, we believe, explained
in part by the continuing influence of native Dutch speakers on
Afrikaans as it developed and in part by the fact that the learners'
languages — Malay, Portuguese Creole, and Hottentot and other Afri-
can languages — ^were sufficiently diverse typologically that their com-
bined effect would have been to promote the emergence only of
unmarked structures, not of marked ones. On this view, Afrikaans
is historically a descendant of Dutch, as the Afrikaners claim, because
it preserves a significant portion of Dutch structures in all its gram-
matical subsystems, even (though much reduced) in the morphology.
But its development into a separate language was in fact heavily
conditioned by nonwhites who learned Dutch imperfectly as a second
language.
Language Contact,
Creolization, and
Genetic Linguistics
Sarah Grey Thomason
and
Terrence Kaufman
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
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