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Afrikaans (was: Re: Columbian Danish (was: political Zera))

From:Matt Pearson <jmpearson@...>
Date:Wednesday, April 12, 2000, 16:38
Kristian Jensen skrev:

>>And even then, I think the administration language tends to form the >>lexical basis for the creole, with only minor additions from the >>original languages of the speakers. > >What's the story with Afrikaans then? Dutch must have certainly been >the administrative language at one time in S.Africa. But Afrikaans >has sufficiently changed since then such that it is now considered a >separate language from Dutch.
Afrikaans is an interesting case, since it served both as the language of colonial immigrants, and (in a creolised form) as a contact language between the immigrants and the Africans they colonised. For a long time, there was a rather broad continuum from Dutch, used as the official administrative language, to the 'Afrikaans proper' of educated Dutch settlers (essentially a somewhat unconservative dialect of Dutch) all the way to the 'debased' Afrikaans used by the plantation workers to communicate with their overseers (little more than a Dutch-based pidgin). Modern Afrikaans is, I believe, a consolidation of features from across that dialect continuum. So, depending on how you look at it, Afrikaans is either a Dutch-based creole heavily influenced by colonial dialects of Dutch, or a descendant of colonial dialects of Dutch which has been heavily creolised. Matt.