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Nowadays the momentum for the evolution of Afrikaans has passed from South Africa’s white Afrikaners (who have been shifting to English outside the farming comm
by OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Nowadays the momentum for the evolution of Afrikaans has passed from South Africa’s white Afrikaners (who have been shifting to English outside the farming community) to the Coloureds (for whom it serves as an important cornerstone of ethnic identity). Already there has been a lot of complaint that standardized descriptions of Afrikaans fail to account for how the Coloureds use the language, and moreover I’m not sure the Coloureds care so much about Afrikaans as a language of technical description and science, they may be content with an English–Afrikaans diglossia in that regard.
- jmopp 3y agoWhat is very interesting is that prior to the separation of the races around 1950, whites and coloureds spoke the same Afrikaans. I read a paper from 1948 which only looked at the white Afrikaans context, but which mentioned that most white Afrikaners were educated in English and spoke Afrikaans with forms which today would be considered typically coloured - i.e pronouncing the word for hands as 'hanne' instead the way it was spelled 'hande'.