Afrikaans in the New World (for lack of a better title)

[MacCaulay]

So I'm reading a book by a South African writer named JH Thompson called An Unpopular War. And it's basically a collection of interviews with servicemen from the South African Defense Force in the 70s and 80s.
The first few chapters include a lot of problems with translation issues, like how the Anglophone recruits could sometimes feel very left out in the Afrikaans-dominated system of the ground forces.

So it got me into checking out some books from the library and grabbing some books from the used book stores about Afrikaans. It has an interesting history, involving the Dutch settlers, the Zulu nation in Natal, and the English that ended up deciding to stay.
What ended up happening, apparently (I speak about as much as a kindergartner, and that's rounding up. Only enough to make sense of what they can't translate in these books.), is that they've dropped the male/female change (like English, not like the Romantic languages), and have slanged alot of the words up.
I'm getting the feeling that Afrikaans did the same things to Dutch that the Australians did to English.

So...what I'm wondering is...why haven't any other New World countries broken away with their own languages? Surely America may have decided to call it's own language "American" after 1776. They did more radical things to prove their independence from the British.
The same could be argued for the Brazilian form of Portuguese, or (and I'm completely convinced of this) both the Quebecois and Cajun forms of French.

Anyone? Could we at any point see an actual "North" or "South American" language?

 

[Kordo]

So...what I'm wondering is...why haven't any other New World countries broken away with their own languages? Surely America may have decided to call it's own language "American" after 1776. They did more radical things to prove their independence from the British.
The same could be argued for the Brazilian form of Portuguese, or (and I'm completely convinced of this) both the Quebecois and Cajun forms of French.

Anyone? Could we at any point see an actual "North" or "South American" language?

Afrikaans really became a unique language, at least from my understanding, after the British had ruled South Africa for a long time. So it wasn't an attempt to distinguish themselves from being Dutch as so much as a natural evolution of being far away from the country that speaks the mother tongue.

That being said I am somewhat surprised that English spoken in America is not more unique like say English in Australia. Perhaps it has to do with the proximity to England? At the end of the day though, I don't think it would have that much of a difference. 'American' English still probably be close enough to British English for speakers of the two to understand each other.

 

[MacCaulay]

Afrikaans really became a unique language, at least from my understanding, after the British had ruled South Africa for a long time. So it wasn't an attempt to distinguish themselves from being Dutch as so much as a natural evolution of being far away from the country that speaks the mother tongue.

That being said I am somewhat surprised that English spoken in America is not more unique like say English in Australia. Perhaps it has to do with the proximity to England? At the end of the day though, I don't think it would have that much of a difference. 'American' English still probably be close enough to British English for speakers of the two to understand each other.

I completely agree with you. That's what's so odd about it.

It's very understandable. What I was surprised about with Afrikaans is alot of Dutch speakers in these books I'm reading talking about how they can speak Dutch to a South African who can speak Afrikaans back, and they can both understand each other with no more trouble than one would have with normal dialect problems.

Which begs the question: if Afrikaans developed into this recognized separate language when it's so linguistically similar to it's mother tongue, what didn't happen in America, or Brazil, or Colombia, or Mexico, to make this happen as well?
And why didn't it?

 

[dreadnought jenkins]

I completely agree with you. That's what's so odd about it.

It's very understandable. What I was surprised about with Afrikaans is alot of Dutch speakers in these books I'm reading talking about how they can speak Dutch to a South African who can speak Afrikaans back, and they can both understand each other with no more trouble than one would have with normal dialect problems.

Which begs the question: if Afrikaans developed into this recognized separate language when it's so linguistically similar to it's mother tongue, what didn't happen in America, or Brazil, or Colombia, or Mexico, to make this happen as well?
And why didn't it?

Maybe a standardisation of the language and greater access to some kind of education put a stop to that. I mean, the Boers were agrarian and cut off for all intents and purposes from the motherland when they did the trek.

Alot of native American dialects have survived in South America, from I've been led to understand, so its not like South America or Brasil are uniformly Spanish or Portuguese...

 

[oudi14]

I am a Bahamian, basically a 2nd generation person who speaks standard English; every English speaker can understand me with no problem, except when I begin to speak in local dialect; this happened some years ago, I had an American girlfriend who couldn't understand Bahamian speech, so I spoke regular English all night long, until one of my friends, who was very drunk, was about to puke his guts out, and I said to him, 'Mitch, you een ga oop, eh? and she said 'that was the first thing you said all night that I didn't understand.'
Bahamian dialect is basically 18th century English, as I imagine Afrikaans is 17th century Dutch.

 

[MacCaulay]

I am a Bahamian, basically a 2nd generation person who speaks standard English; every English speaker can understand me with no problem, except when I begin to speak in local dialect; this happened some years ago, I had an American girlfriend who couldn't understand Bahamian speech, so I spoke regular English all night long, until one of my friends, who was very drunk, was about to puke his guts out, and I said to him, 'Mitch, you een ga oop, eh? and she said 'that was the first thing you said all night that I didn't understand.'
Bahamian dialect is basically 18th century English, as I imagine Afrikaans is 17th century Dutch.

There. I think you ran across part of it. There are certain languages, perhaps, that will move at different speeds in different places.

So, when the Boers moved to the Cape, they brought the language with them in the state it was in when they left. The Dutch DID end up having colonial empire, but it wasn't one extensive, and it wasn't nearly as pervasive in their public life the way that the British colonies were.

In the case of the South Africans, their surroundings might have inspired them to become much more inventive with their language than the Dutch ever were. Obviously: they kicked out the male and female clauses. That's awfully damn big.

Now I wonder, oudi, if the reason none of the other languages were actually recognized as such in the Caribbean or in the Americas was because the dominant societies of the time decided that they weren't really worth recognizing. A kind of cultural chauvenism.
Not that I'm agreeing with that, it's just that I can see that happening. I mean, I was thinking about the dialects of French being spoken in Quebec, Portuguese in Brazil, or the English in America, I never even thought about the Caribbean.

 

[DuQuense]

It's very understandable. What I was surprised about with Afrikaans is alot of Dutch speakers in these books I'm reading talking about how they can speak Dutch to a South African who can speak Afrikaans back, and they can both understand each other with no more trouble than one would have with normal dialect problems.

I read somewhere that this is also true with Polish and Russian, as long as the two speak slow and distinctly with no Dialect.

Spanish is a very stable language, with a 12 century speaker being able to understand Modern Spanish [and vice versa]

The problem is there never was the separation in the Americas that whe had in SAfrica. And whe [US] shared dictionaries [other Books] with England, helping to keep the Language close.

This also happened with SAmerica/Spain and Brazil/Portuguese, There never was a Point of total Splitting.
That said Despite several Million Pounds spent by Britain Post War, to send British Teachers to other [non English] countries, to teach British English, American English is the More common Variety Worldwide. As is Brazilian Portuguese.

Argentina is the closest to having a Separate Language -- due to the large Italian population -- A lot of The Spanish words are now pronounced as if Italian.

 

[Theodoric]

In the case of the South Africans, their surroundings might have inspired them to become much more inventive with their language than the Dutch ever were. Obviously: they kicked out the male and female clauses. That's awfully damn big.

Dutch also kicked out any male/female grammatical differences, although that might just be paralellism; Afrikaans isn't that much more simple than Dutch. Afrikaans is still very much recognisable as a descendant of several Hollandic dialects, though; its evolution was very lineair.

I can distantly remember knowing of several creole languages that were rather popular in the Carribean and the East Indies; I can't think of a way for them to still be used, though.

 

[sahaidak]

Now I wonder, oudi, if the reason none of the other languages were actually recognized as such in the Caribbean or in the Americas was because the dominant societies of the time decided that they weren't really worth recognizing. A kind of cultural chauvenism.

I think so. A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot (A language is a dialect with an army and navy), as Max Weinreich (or his unnamed student) said. Of course, American English has its own army and navy, but the USA does not consider its dialect as separate language. However, even there were exceptions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Language

 

[HJ Tulp]

Don't forget that the Boers weren't a purely Dutch group. There were significant numbers of French, Walloons and Germans among them.

 

[minifidel]

As an (essentially) fluent french speaker, I have to say that Quebecois and Acadian are very difficult to understand, but I think that has more to do with the insane accents they have rather than any big linguistic differences (at least for the Quebecois, I haven't personally spoken to an Acadian).

 

[Valdemar II]

As an (essentially) fluent french speaker, I have to say that Quebecois and Acadian are very difficult to understand, but I think that has more to do with the insane accents they have rather than any big linguistic differences (at least for the Quebecois, I haven't personally spoken to an Acadian).

Dialects usual share grammatic differencies too, beside the pronouncement differencies.

 

[Paul Spring]

American English probably remained closer to British English because the USA had very strong economic and fairly strong cultural connections to Britain after it became a separate country. Even so, there are considerable differences between the two. I think that the differences between US and British English may have actually been greater several decades ago, and have been reduced a little bit by modern media allowing each country to influence the other.

 

[Dan1988]

As an (essentially) fluent french speaker, I have to say that Quebecois and Acadian are very difficult to understand, but I think that has more to do with the insane accents they have rather than any big linguistic differences (at least for the Quebecois, I haven't personally spoken to an Acadian).

Acadian French is difficult for me to understand, but for me Québec French isn't all that hard to understand (of course, that's because it's a combo of various dialects that levelled out) - only the vocabulary and some pronunciations are different. However, Acadian French is WAY out there - virtually all the speakers came from SW France (and its shows - gouvarnement vs. gouvernement, for example) and their dialect is archaic, more so than Québec French.

 

[MacCaulay]

Acadian French is difficult for me to understand, but for me Québec French isn't all that hard to understand (of course, that's because it's a combo of various dialects that levelled out) - only the vocabulary and some pronunciations are different. However, Acadian French is WAY out there - virtually all the speakers came from SW France (and its shows - gouvarnement vs. gouvernement, for example) and their dialect is archaic, more so than Québec French.

I think that's a big thing that seems to have come up as far as spelling is concerned. Eventually, alot of languages when they leave home will drop the original spelling of a word and go with the "lazy" phoenetic spelling that their accent comes up with.
Eventually, this altered spelling (we're talking an a here and an e there, multiplied over the years) may take a toll on the language.
What this might bring into affect, then, if the cultural pressures are right, is the need for an ethnic group that hasn't got it's own country, or for a country that feels it's far enough out afield, to develop it's own language.

What the South Africans had was an extended period of isolation. The Australians could have easily had that, and for the same reasons, had there been (I know this'll sound ASB) a larger Aboriginal population on the island that put them in the same position as the Boers early on.
Or if Britain had just cut them off completely right after they'd dropped them off. (The gears in my head are turning...)

I think this is an unexplored idea on this thread: how cultures can be defined and united by their language, not just by a war against an outside enemy. To often we ask ourselves to devise a situation where a country turns outward for a unifying force. A language asks the country to turn inwards.

 

[Dan1988]

I think that's a big thing that seems to have come up as far as spelling is concerned. Eventually, alot of languages when they leave home will drop the original spelling of a word and go with the "lazy" phoenetic spelling that their accent comes up with.
Eventually, this altered spelling (we're talking an a here and an e there, multiplied over the years) may take a toll on the language.
What this might bring into affect, then, if the cultural pressures are right, is the need for an ethnic group that hasn't got it's own country, or for a country that feels it's far enough out afield, to develop it's own language.

Actually, that bit is more eye dialect than anything else used by a few people, but it does highlight a rule which, IIRC, is also found in some areas of Québec - namely that "e" becomes "a" before a liquid or a nasal (but is still written gouvernement). And it wasn't 'lazy' at all - that was a common feature of that particular dialect.

What the South Africans had was an extended period of isolation.

Same with les Canadiens, though tack on British colonialism to that.

I think this is an unexplored idea on this thread: how cultures can be defined and united by their language, not just by a war against an outside enemy. To often we ask ourselves to devise a situation where a country turns outward for a unifying force. A language asks the country to turn inwards.

I'm actually going to use that in my own TL, though I had planned for it long beforehand.

 

[Admiral Brown]

Bahamian dialect is basically 18th century English, as I imagine Afrikaans is 17th century Dutch.

I think that to get an American "Afrikaans", you'd need:

A) Isolation between the colony and the mother country at an early date
B) Make the speakers of the language willing to consider their tongue a language and to validate it, instead of considering it a dialect and to prefer the motrherland's language as the standart form of language (at least for writting).

There are a couple of interesting cases in Argentina.

1) An antropologist who worked in the 1970ies within a comunity of peasants of Amerindian descent in the Northernmost part of Argentina, at more then 4000 m, close to the Bolivian border, said once in class that they found that these people, although they spoke Spanish, used very "unusual" words in their dailly speach. At first they thought they were using Quichuan words, but it turned out most of these words were Arab (!) They where using words of Arabian origin common in early XVI century Spanish, but abandoned later.

2) The language spoken by Gauchos in the XIX century (oversimplifing a lot, Gauchos were our local version of cowboys), was a language of its own. reading Martín Fierro or Gaucho poetry would show any Spanish speaker how much their language differed from standart Spanish.

However, nowadays almost nobody speaks like Gauchos, at leasty not naturally, and the communities in the Puna are probably naming their kids with English names. Why none of this evolved into a language? Because the people in the cities never considered them the proper standart Spanish. After the country got independent, when an uniform educational system was establish, it was standart Spanish which was tought, not the dialect Gauchos spoke, let alone the XVI century spanish some communities in the Puna spoke. The dialest of the Gauchos gradually faded off.

However, some "archaisms" where indeed accepted and became part of the "official" Argentinian Spanish (1). The use of "Vos" instead of "tú" (you), common in the XVI century, but abandoned later in Spain, Perú and México, and which survived in parts of Central America and Colombia, but only as an incult way of speaking , become "acceptable" in Argentina. This probably happened because it was common in Buenos Aires, and Buenos Aires was who eventually determined which was the right way to speak Spanish in Argentina. Parts of Argentina once used to say "tú" anded up saying "vos", due to the prestige of Rioplatense dialect.

The influence of Italian dialects was also important, but that happened at a later date, and it's a different matter.

The Tú/vos case is an interesting one, cause it shows how this things work. In the early XVI century, both "tú" and "vos" were used in oral speach. However, by the XVII century, the form "Vos" was abandoned in Spain. The form "vos" was also abandoned in the areas were the Spanish presence was stronger, such as Central Mexico or Perú. It survived in marginal areas, such as Colombia, Central America or the River Plate. When the Spanish colonies got independent, the new independent countries in which the use of "vos" had survived were usually ruled from areas where it hadn't. The Mexican empire was ruled from Mexcio city, not from Guatemala or Chiapas. Colombia was ruled from Bogotá, not from the Caribean.

Thus, the "voseo" kept being considered an incorrect, incult and marginal form of speaking. In Argentina, however, a strange thing had occured: an are which used to be poor and marginal (the River Plate Bassin) till the late XVIII Century, and thus, preserved the use of the form "vos", became eventually the center of the new country. Thus, the "voseo" was legitimased (after failed attempts to combat it), and became popular in areas which had abandoned that form of speach ages ago.

So, if the people in a colonny in the Americas separate from the mother country early, and, for whatever reason, they decide to legitimise their speach giving it a language status, you'd get an American Afrikaans



(1) I used inverted comas because there's no such thing as "official Argentinian Spanish". Officially, our language is Spanish. Period. However, it differs slightly from the Spanish spoken elsewhere. I used the term to refer to the form of language used by newspapers writers, TV journalists, teachers, etc.

 

[MacCaulay]

2) The language spoken by Gauchos in the XIX century (oversimplifing a lot, Gauchos were our local version of cowboys), was a language of its own. reading Martín Fierro or Gaucho poetry would show any Spanish speaker how much their language differed from standart Spanish.

However, nowadays almost nobody speaks like Gauchos, at leasty not naturally, and the communities in the Puna are probably naming their kids with English names. Why none of this evolved into a language? Because the people in the cities never considered them the proper standart Spanish. After the country got independent, when an uniform educational system was establish, it was standart Spanish which was tought, not the dialect Gauchos spoke, let alone the XVI century spanish some communities in the Puna spoke. The dialest of the Gauchos gradually faded off.

This is really useful! Thanks, Adm. Brown! So, what we're seeing over and over is that interconnectedness will keep a language homogenized.
The national school system would act like that, just like free trade would on an international level.

This is all great stuff.

 

[Dan1988]

Interesting about the words of Arabic origin, Admiral. Of course, compared with the other varieties, djudeo-espanyol (aka Sefardí, also [incorrectly] known as Ladino) is probably way out there, and not just due to the archaic pronunciation, or the highly divergent lexicon (courtesy of Hebrew), and the like. From this web site:

"You're speaking just like Cervantes," he said. I was in a cantina in Madrid in 1957. I met a man there, he was a reporter. We were conversing over a few drinks. I understood his puzzlement and had to explain. I was speaking the Spanish dialect I had learned at home. The dialect, or maybe it is a separate language, is commonly called, Ladino. More properly it should be referred to as, Djudeo Espanyol.
The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. My ancestors found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, and settled on the Island of Rhodes. Ottoman Jewish communities flourished in Rhodes , Salonika, Izmir, Istanbul, Sarajevo and elsewhere for 500 years and there they preserved the language that they had taken with them from Spain; Fifteenth Century Spanish, the dialect of Columbus, Ferdinand, Isabella and Cervantes. To that reporter in Madrid it was as if a modern American were to meet someone who spoke the English of Shakespearean times.
I grew up in a close knit Sephardic community in Los Angeles and assumed that Spanish was the language of the Jews. Not until I was in Junior High School did I learn that some Jews did not speak Spanish, they spoke a strange tongue called, Yiddish.
An even greater revelation was that our Spanish was different from that spoken in Spain and Latin America today. "Today we are going to learn some words in Spanish," said my fifth grade teacher. She continued, "The first thing that you must learn is that in Spanish the letter ‘j' is pronounced like an ‘h'". I thought she was crazy or at least uninformed, at home we pronounced the "j" as an English or French; "zh" or "dzh". Sometimes it was "sh" as in the word dejar which we pronounced deshar, in modern Spanish it is pronounced; dehar. And some of the words were different; we would say, aninda (yet), trocar (change), chapeo (hat) and chapines (shoes), for the modern Spanish words, todavia, cambiar, sombrero and zapatos. Years later I found that the first three words were Portuguese and the fourth was Catalan.
Another major difference between Ladino and modern Spanish is in the word for God. The Spanish say Dios, derived from the Latin, Deus. But to the Spanish Jews this was unacceptable because Dios ends in the letter "s" and that implies that Dios is plural. The foundation of the Jewish faith is that God is singular. This concept is reinforced every time we recite the Shemah: "...the lord is One." We always referred to God as: El Dio, always including the article El.
Another difference is our word for Sunday. In modern Spanish it is Domingo. But this comes from the Latin word for the "Lords Day." To the Jews Saturday is the Lords Day and we referred to Sunday as Alhát. I found later that this was the Arabic word for "The First Day," it is related to the Hebrew word Ehad (one).
When I heard about the Crypto Jews of New Mexico, I wondered if they had preserved any elements of the Ladino dialect. In my communications with Crypto Jews I found many who's grandparents said El Dio rather than Dios but none who called Sunday Alhat.
Other possible Ladino elements were the including of an extra "n" in many words and of reversing the "r" with another letter. We say muncho (much) rather than mucho and godro (fat) and prove (poor) rather than gordo and povre. I found that it is very common for rural New Mexicans to add the extra "n," but, few examples of the "r" shift.
Does this indicate that the Crypto Jews of New Mexico are indeed descended from the conversos of Spain. The linguistic evidence is not absolute, but together with so much other evidence, it strengthens the argument. The strongest evidence is in the preservation of El Dio. No Christian would use such words.

 

[Burton K Wheeler]

Interesting about the words of Arabic origin, Admiral. Of course, compared with the other varieties, djudeo-espanyol (aka Sefardí, also [incorrectly] known as Ladino) is probably way out there, and not just due to the archaic pronunciation, or the highly divergent lexicon (courtesy of Hebrew), and the like. From this web site:

Hey, that has nothing to do with the OP!