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

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.