Plausibility check: Primarily Anglophonic South Africa

Fenris

Banned
With as late a POD as possible, is it possible for the English language to be the most prevalent language in South Africa, rather than Dutch/Afrikaans?

EDIT: Shoot, meant to put in pre-1900.
 
I have heard contradicting things on Afrikaaner; on one side, it have the legacy of Apartheid on it, but I heard some african teachers defending the right of teaching in it, if I am right... if the balance make it that Afrikaan is too tainted, and English a langauge of progress, like pushed by the Communists, maybe...
 
Yes, no, well, fine. It is a bit more complex really.

Afrikaans is (wow) invented in Africa. It is using Dutch grammar, but has a lot of words from especially Malaysia, Java, and so on. It is quite simple, not too many words and the grammar is not particular difficult to get on with (I could after some 7 months after all).

The Java influence is significant insofar as a lot of the Dutch came from Java, not necessarily from Holland itself. They took their slaves along, hence the Muslim community got established from java.

Funny little thing: one of the first books to be printed in SA is a Muslim prayer book, printed in Cape Town. It is using Arabic lettering, but the language used is: Afrikaans (How, I don't know).

On top of, Afrikaans is also influenced by the Dutch coming here, which were sailors and military personnel.

That influence can be seen in a lot of words used (btw, I was in Holland some time ago, they could easily understand my Afrikaans but found it very old-fashioned, rather prinmitive and so on).

A good word in Afrikaans for kitchen is Kombuis. That thing (in Dutch) is found onboard a ship, not in a house.

Warfare in Afrikaans is Orlog - something maritime as well
... and so on.

The majortity of the so-called coloured community is Afrikaans speaking. One province (Northern Cape) is 68% Afrikaans speaking. Outside of the cities, it can be Afrikaans. If I am in Pietersurg (Polokwane), I would be addressed in Afrikaans by default.

That said. English is the dominant language insofar as we are all supposed to be (reasonable) fluent in English and then go for whatever woudl suit us.

Wether it is English is also open to debate, as we tend to use a lot of local words interchangeable at all times (a bit of a mix really).

With 11 official languages we have plenty of choice.

Another funny is that we are probably (Marius, help!) majority Zulu. If yuo just hapen to be black, and not Zulu, a Zulu might not answer you if yuo cannot speak his language. I am SePedi speaking from Limpopo, which does not carry any weight in Eastern Cape among Xhosa (which I cannot get my tongue around)

The real "bushmen" from Northern Cape (branching into Namibia) have a language which is mostly just 'click' sounds. sounds very funny and a total mystery (to me at least). How does a name like "X!" grab you.

So, It is a bit more complex

Ivan
 
Well to get an Anglophonic South Africa you basically need more English speakers. In OTL the population of British South Africans peaked at around 2 million so you need to boost that.
That shouldn't be very hard, in comparison to Australia and Canada South Africa got a minuscule amount of British immigration throughout the 19th and 20th century, substantially less than New Zealand! So as you are starting from such a low base doubling or tripling it should be pretty easy.
Increasing it eight fold to match Australia is probably ASB, there were plenty of good reasons why Australia was more attractive than SA including more farm land, more demand for unskilled labour, earlier gold, better political environment etc.
If you have say tripled British immigration to South Africa throughout the 19th century you not only have a much larger white population but even after the Boer Republics are incorporated the majority of the white population will be English speaking rather than Afrikaans. That means you will have an English dominated culture meaning that not only will there be a degree of language switch from Afrikaans to English (unlike OTL where there was more English to Afrikaans) but that where the Africans (not the Coloureds) learn a European language it will be English. That should deliver a primarily Anglophonic South Africa though indigenous languages like Zulu are probably still going to outnumber English as a First Language.
 
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Erm, am I missing something here? Even if Afrikaans has more native speakers in SA than English, the most prevalent languages in South Africa by native speakers are Zulu and Xhosa. By total speakers, English wins, as just barely more people understand it than Zulu. Really, you could make an argument that SA already uses English as its dominant language.

If you mean make it more dominant (since I concede that it has only the most tenuous claim on the title), then I would suggest that the National Party, for whatever reason, develops some kind of internal schism and fails to become dominant in SA politics. Without a central Afrikaner party, the English-speaking parties rise to prominence, and the Afrikaner language is afforded less protection. Apartheid isn't instituted (or, it's instituted to a lesser degree). There are more urban blacks, which tend to learn English, and more coloreds. English is spoken by just over 50% of the population, and about 20% of the country's population speaks it natively; Afrikaans is spoken by about 8% natively.
 
Well, English is, by default, the main language. It is the common denominator.

It probably can be said that it is the fall-back option, if everything else fails.
 
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