Afrikaans colonial past

How it can show histories: Afrikaans colonial past

from my essay:

The English and the Dutch formed their own hybrid language using words and phrases from each of their own: Afrikaans. Consequently, Afrikaans is considered by some to be a ‘racist’ language because it is associated with apartheid. I never considered this and I only found out about this point of view last year when I was printing a poem in Afrikaans (apology of offending) onto material when another student (also South African) approached me and asked me why I was using the language of oppression. So I decided to research into the origins of Afrikaans; it started out in the Cape when the Dutch East India Trading Company made port (Roberge). The settlers spoke Dutch and when they arrived they encountered Khoekhoe people, the native people of the land. “Afro-European contact required at least a minimal form of communication between speakers of mutually unintelligible and typologically very different languages. Individual ad hoc solutions to the problem of inter-ethnic communication were a natural, if not inevitable, development, and our source material preserves fragments of jargonised and inter-language forms of Dutch in the mouths of Khoekhoe” (Roberge, 80). The natives at least attempted to speak Dutch as the settlers were never bothered to learn the native language resulting in the main base of Afrikaans being Dutch. “The decline of Khoekhoe identity as it had existed prior to 1652 was exacerbated by attendant language shift” (Roberge, 80) due to them learning “jargonised forms of Dutch” (Roberge, 82) to communicate to the Dutch when the Khoekhoe were ‘in service’ of the Europeans by 1800 (Roberge, 81). The Khoekhoe dialect began to disappear through the mid-eighteenth century after most of their population died from a smallpox epidemic (Roberge). This was the beginning of the hybrid language, when the British got involved there was more English influence on the language to get it to the way it is now. It truly is a colonialist language; it was created by repressing a native language and enslaving those who spoke it. It was then spoken by the founding government of Apartheid which increased its negative status.

Roberge, Paul T. “Afrikaans: considering origins.” Language in South Africa, edited by Rajend Mesthrie, Cambridge university press, 2002, pp. 79-103