Introduction
This article gives an appraisal of bilingualism in Afrikaans and English among the Cape ‘Coloured’ community and of shifting patterns within it. It has become customary to use quotation marks around the term Coloured and lower case to signal that this and other race-based terms are contested ones in South Africa (see Erasmus, Reference Erasmus and Erasmus2001; Ruiters, Reference Ruiters and Adhikari2009). On the advice of the ET editor for this issue, however, I will use the term with the capital and without quotation marks, since he argues – conversely – that the use of lower case and scare quotes in print can also be misconstrued as disrespect for a community. In this community it appears that a shift is underway from Afrikaans as first and as home language to English as the dominant family language. However, this shift does not follow a straightforward linear trajectory, and while some speakers appear to have abandoned Afrikaans in favour of English, in many families the language has not been jettisoned. Before citing studies that explore this complexity, including current work by the author, it is necessary to give a brief overview of the background to Afrikaans and English in South Africa and their place in the country's overall multilingualism.
The 1994 constitution of South Africa and the 1996 language policy developed by the new government acknowledged the pervasiveness of multilingualism in the country in recognising 11 official languages. Of interest here is how the languages are not equally distributed throughout the country. None of the country's official regions has only one language and none can claim monolingualism in a majority of its inhabitants. Table 1 below gives a summary of how the various languages are distributed in terms of numbers of speakers in the different regions. The percentages given in brackets indicate the percentages of the previous (2001) census. The only remarkable change in the past 10 years is in the ranking of English, which has overtaken Sepedi in the number of L1 speakers, and at 9.6% of the national population is the language which has shown the greatest increase in number and percentage of L1 speakers.
Table 1: Distribution of South African languages according to the 2011 census. (Source: Statistics South Africa)
Gauteng, the economic hub of the country, is the most multilingual in terms of the variety of languages used in its speech communities. In the Western Cape, the area of interest to this study, three national languages account for the first language of the overwhelming majority of the population. Notably, Afrikaans was most widely represented until 2001 in the Western Cape communities as an L1 at 55%; the 2011 census shows a decline in this figure, to 49.7%. The other community languages that people identify as their first languages are isiXhosa (23% in 2001; 24.7% in 2011) and English (19% in 2001; 20.2% in 2011). The changes in demographics of the last decade indicate a slight growth in the numbers of isiXhosa L1 and English L1 speakers, though overall such figures do not seem to mark significant changes.
Background to the competition between Afrikaans and English
Afrikaans is the South African offshoot of Dutch that goes back to 1652, when the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) started a halfway-station to ensure that their trading ships were provided with fresh produce on the long journey to the East. Prior to this event a period of 164 years of sporadic contact and rudimentary communication between passing ships and indigenous communities such as the Khoekhoe is recorded. Rather than drawing primarily on the indigenous Khoesan people, the VOC ensured a constant supply of labour by bringing in slaves from as early as 1658 from a variety of regions where their trading activities took them. The slave population at the Cape was one of the most diverse globally in terms of their varying ethnic backgrounds (Worden, Reference Worden1985; Shell, Reference Shell1994). Hence, from quite early on the population in and around Cape Town could be identified as a polyglot society. Slaves from Malaysia, Indonesia, Madagascar, East Africa and West Africa needed to communicate not only with their Dutch masters, but also with their fellow workers (Roberge, Reference Roberge and Mesthrie2002a). Inevitably, the language of the dominant community was used as the language of cross-cultural communication. Thus, by the time slavery officially was abolished in 1808, there was a fairly well-established group of second language (L2) speakers of Dutch in the Western Cape. In tracing the development of Afrikaans from the seventeenth-century Dutch of the tradesmen, the contact with Khoekhoe and with slaves, particularly those of Muslim Malaysian origin, has been mentioned as critically important. It remains an open sociohistorical linguistic question whether Afrikaans can be seen as a regional continuation of European Dutch with admixture from other languages, or whether it is largely a restructured variety that can be fruitfully described from the vantage point of language contact and creole studies (see Den Besten, Reference Den Besten, Pütz and René1989; Roberge, Reference Roberge2002b; McWhorter, Reference McWhorter1998). Importantly for this study, the community that was later referred to as the Coloured community of the Cape most likely produced the first speakers of Afrikaans. Muslim clerics were also the ones who first wrote in Afrikaans, using Arabic script (see Davids, Reference Davids1990).
The origins of English in South Africa (and the Cape in particular) dates to 1795 in the context of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. The British occupation of the Cape was a means of safeguarding British trade with the East. In 1803 with the Napoleonic threat averted, the ‘station’ in Cape Town was returned to the VOC. In 1806 the English were back, ready to take the 150+ year old settlement by force, if need be. As it turned out, the VOC relinquished its position at the Cape without much resistance. When the company returned to the Netherlands, it left behind a well-established community of ‘Free Burghers’ (see Giliomee and Mbenga, Reference Giliomee and Mbenga2008) and slaves or former slaves all speaking as their L1 a variety of Dutch, sometimes referred to as ‘Cape Dutch’. Although there was British governance in the Cape from 1806 onwards, numbers of English speakers were too small initially to have much of an impact. Fourteen years later, by 1820, there were still no more than 757 Britons living in Cape Town. In the early years of British authority a ‘light touch government’ interfered very little in established Dutch community structures. When British government control increased, many of the Dutch-speaking farmers moved away, taking themselves into the interior and to the eastern parts of the country, beyond the boundaries of the Cape Colony. In linguistic terms, this meant that Dutch (often a variety that was grammatically showing more and more language-contact phenomena) was preserved as a strong community language in the South African context.
However, it was not Dutch that eventually survived but the colloquial offshoot, Afrikaans, which was developed into a written standard language. In 1875 the Genootskap vir Regte Afrikaners (‘Fellowship of True Afrikaners’) was founded in Paarl, with the express intent of recognising and developing Afrikaans as a language in its own right, distinct from Dutch and suitable as a language for literary endeavours and in education. In 1910, after the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), and when unification of the four colonies was implemented, the British colonial government did not choose English only as the official language of the newly formed political entity. Rather, it recognised how widely Dutch/Afrikaans was distributed, and, partly also seeking to unify a linguistically as well as ideologically divided country, introduced two official languages, English and Dutch. By the early 1920s the differences between Afrikaans and Dutch had become evident, in that Dutch had for a very large part of the community become an inaccessible language which excluded them from participation in public domains such as education and public office. English was an L2 for many, but still not a lingua franca that afforded equal opportunity with L1 speakers of English. This was the sociopolitical context that led to the replacement of Dutch by Afrikaans as the second official language in 1925. As is regularly the case with language standardisation, an ideology of linguistic purity developed around the new official language. This gave status to the language of the elites and marginalised (in some cases even stigmatised) non-standard varieties, especially those of the Coloured community.
Recent studies of the Afrikaans-to-English shift in the Western Cape
Studies of non-standard dialects of Afrikaans considered grammatical and social aspects of linguistic variation in a number of Afrikaans L1 communities (see e.g. Van Rensburg, Reference Van Rensburg1977; Nieuwoudt, Reference Nieuwoudt1990; Den Besten, Hinskens & Koch, Reference Den Besten, Hinskens and Koch2009). Particularly interesting for this study is the work of McCormick (Reference McCormick2003), who recorded and analysed identifying features of the language of District Six. In the history of forced removal of communities, and of disregarding established community rights and basic claims of citizenship, District Six has gained iconic status. Therefore the indication not only of Afrikaans-English code-switching as a marked feature in the language of this community, but also of the mixed form as the only form that many know by the 1980s, is significant.
I now provide a summary of the findings of a number of qualitative research projects in which I investigated the perceived shift from Afrikaans to English in the Coloured communities of the Western Cape. Language shift in this study refers to a process by which ‘a community gives up a language completely in favour of another one’ (Fasold, Reference Fasold1984: 213). However, other scholars use a broader definition of the term, allowing the possibility of one language giving way to another partially or completely. The chosen working definition adopted by the North West Territories Literacy Council (1999: 3,10), which focuses on indigenous Australian languages, is that of language shift as a process of change across generations: ‘If elders still speak their traditional language but their grandchildren do not, then language shift has occurred.’ We may also note another situation where a shift in dominance may occur in a bilingual community or sub-community.
Family languages: bilingualism and language shift
Anthonissen & George (Reference Anthonissen and George2003) interviewed members of three generations in three families where third generation members (aged between 10 and 26 years old) invariably could understand the Afrikaans of their parents and grandparents, but themselves would speak only English. The responses of first and second generation members of the families (aged respectively older than 55, and between 35 and 55) confirmed that there is language shift and that the third generation project either a monolingual English identity with Afrikaans having a decidedly second language status, or a strong English-dominant bilingual identity. Respondents’ own identification of the languages used in the workplace, as well as the language of learning selected by parents for their children, were taken as indicators of language identities.
In a follow-up to the exploratory study of 2003, more data was collected in 2008 and 2009 to investigate the linguistic repertoires and language choices in families where there has been contact between English and Afrikaans over a number of generations. The ultimate aim was to confirm the perceived trend of language shift, and to characterise the nature of this process. This study (Anthonissen, Reference Anthonissen2009) found that language shift across three generations is widely established in the Western Cape metropolitan area, even if it is not ‘universal’. Respondents pointed out that parents whose own L1 was Afrikaans were opting for English as the L1 of their children, especially in middle class, upwardly mobile communities and considerably less so among Afrikaans working class families. A 2012 survey in two such Coloured working class communities confirmed the respondents’ suggestion that Afrikaans has remained the L1 of those of lower socio-economic status. In ‘Rondomskrik’ (Macassar) 43 respondents indicated Afrikaans as their L1, and only 6 of these indicated English as one of their languages of learning; in ‘Chris Nissan Park’ the large majority of 144 respondents indicated that they were Afrikaans L1 speakers; 8 indicated isiXhosa as their L1, 3 indicated English as their L1 and 1 did not identify any preference regarding which language they would count as their L1.
Nevertheless, the various studies have confirmed that what was historically an Afrikaans L1 community has, to a considerable degree, premeditatedly given up Afrikaans in favour of English L1. The replacement of Afrikaans as home language is partial, not ‘complete’, in the sense that often older family members communicate in Afrikaans, while younger family members speak only English in family interactions and among friends. Many members of the third generation indicate that they have receptive proficiency in Afrikaans. Some express regret that they have not been able to maintain the language in which their parents communicate with one another, and which other family members still use in everyday interaction.
In probing why such large numbers of Afrikaans families in Coloured communities have made these language choices in the last 20 to 30 years, an interesting picture emerges. Rather than referring to the need to distance themselves from the ‘language of the oppressor’, respondents were adamant that fluency in English is a skill that will improve social mobility and employment opportunities. This perception of the value of English was evident across all three generations of interviewees, regardless of whether they had Afrikaans as their own L1 or not, as is articulated in (1) and (2).
(1) … die status van Engels / Engels is beskou / was beskou as 'n elitetaal (J4.2)
[the status of English / English is seen / was seen as an elite language]
(2) … Engels is iets wat jy oral mee kan gaan (E6.1)
[English is something that you can take with you everywhere you go]
Related to status was the second generation insistence that their own experiences of limited proficiency in English had been socially embarrassing and frustrating. Some mentioned the difficulties they had experienced as students having to battle working with English text books.
(3) Ek het gevoel ek willie hê my kinders moet deur daai / daai um trauma gaan nie (lag) sal ek it maar nou so sê want dit was vir my nogal baie erg / want op kollege het ons / ons notas alles Afrikaans gekry maar dit was vir my 'n baie groot sprong op universiteit toe't ek nou moes die Engels vertaal het en s- / dat allie boeke hoofsaaklik in Engels was en ek wou nie gehad het my kinders moes daardeur gaan nie (J1.2)
[I felt that I don't want my children to go through that / that um trauma (laugh) shall I put it that way because it was really quite bad for me / because at college we had / our notes all in Afrikaans but it was 'n big step university when I had to translate the English and s- / that all the books were mainly in English and I did not want my children to go through the same thing].
Many mentioned that they simply wanted the best schools for their children in terms of academic standards and of discipline; in their context these were English schools. Associated with the argument for better schools and better educational opportunities is one of political awareness. Many who had Afrikaans as their L1 decided to raise their children in English as an act of defiance and a way of distancing themselves from the apartheid government that had denied them citizenship rights and dignity.
(4) … ook as ons liewer hulle in Engels grootmaak want / destyds / was daar mos nou nie sprake van Stellenbosch Universiteit wat Afrikaans sou wees waar my kinders welkom sou wees nie, verstaan jy? (J2.2)
[also if we rather raised them in English because / at the time / there was no thought of Stellenbosch University that would be Afrikaans where my children would be welcome, you know?]
(5) … en dan ook as gevolg van die land se beleid / eh die apartheidskwessie dat hulle jou nie wou erken het as mede-Afrikaner of as mede-Afrikaanssprekende / eh jy't nie trots gevoel saam oor jou taal nie / alhoewel jy baie lief was vir jou taal (J4.2)
[… and then also as a result of the country's policy / eh the apartheid issue that they didn't want to acknowledge one as a fellow-Afrikaner or as fellow speaker of Afrikaans / eh one didn't feel shared pride in your language / although you really liked your language ]
With reference to dialect differences, many mentioned the status of the community dialect as inhibiting. Women whose fathers spoke Afrikaans with pride and were sensitive to the differences between ‘standard Afrikaans’ and ‘Kaapse Afrikaans’ monitored the usage of their children, correcting ‘errors’ in pronunciation and grammar, thus trying to educate them into the elite variety. To one Generation 3 respondent in 2003 this was disconcerting, as she was never quite sure whether her father would be satisfied. She resorted to speaking English only to her father. In addition, she experienced conflict in speaking standard Afrikaans to please an older generation, and then being taunted with ‘Djy hou vi djou wit’ by her peers for trying to be too smart. English provided a way out of the dilemma she had in choosing between the two varieties. This sentiment was also apparent in the 2009 data where a few parents indicated that they preferred and actually used a variety closer to the standard even if many in their community interpreted this as ‘trying to be white’. They were candid about their preference for English rather than the low-status Afrikaans they believed their children would pick up in the neighbourhood.
(6) … ek dink nie hulle sal die Afrikaans gepraat het as 'n standaardtaal nie / dit was een van my primêre redes (J3.2)
[I don't think they would have spoken the Afrikaans as a standard language / that was one of my primary reasons]
The value English has in a globalising world was mentioned as a reason for cultivating this global language as the L1 of their children. Parents wanted their offspring to be in an ideal position to profit from this status of English.
(7) … die kinders is ek bly voor / hulle't nie nodig om om die hoekie te staan / as daar Engels gepraat word (E6.1)
[… I am pleased for the children's sake / they don't need to hide in a little corner / when English is being spoken]
Finally, at least two parents, in recalling their own difficulties with learning and confidently using English, felt that they live in Afrikaans communities where the children hear Afrikaans all the time and so would easily pick it up in the neighbourhood. Therefore, to ensure better bilingual skills, they had to give their children direct exposure to English in the home.
Language choice: bilingual parents, monolingual children?
One of the domains in which the language shift from Afrikaans to English is most evident is in primary and secondary schools, where parents’ choice of the medium-of-instruction (MoI) of their children is exercised. Respondents in the interviews cited in the previous section indicated that schools which were once wholly Afrikaans-medium have gradually introduced English-medium classes. In many of these schools English-medium classes now outnumber Afrikaans ones, and English-medium classes are the preferred choice for reasons of prestige. These indicators were followed-up in two studies (Farmer, Reference Farmer2008; Farmer & Antonissen, Reference Farmer and Anthonissen2010). Language repertoire and decisions on school enrollment of learners from Afrikaans homes were investigated in a historically white, Afrikaans-only high school where English-medium classes had been introduced. Considering also the link between language and ethnicity, the linguistic preferences and patterns of language choice and language use of a group of 303 learners between 16 and 18 years old were traced. Reported uses of English and Afrikaans in domains beyond the school, notably at home with relatives and friends, were taken as indicative of linguistic identities. The patterns and preferences of learners from Coloured communities reflect a drastic reduction of Afrikaans in families that formerly had a decidedly Afrikaans identity.
Specifically, it was found that in the sample of 229 grade 10 and 11 learners registered in the English L1 classes, 141 (i.e. 61.6%) came from homes identified as Afrikaans L1 (Farmer & Anthonissen, Reference Farmer and Anthonissen2010: 12). Older family members who are more proficient in Afrikaans tend to accommodate the youngsters who are more proficient in English. Parents who introduced English as their children's L1, and chose it as MoI, report that eventually it seems their children have better English language skills than they themselves do:
(8) Hulle ken mos beter as ek en correct my left right en centre as ek verkeerd praat. Engels is mos hulle first language, nie myne nie.
[They clearly know (English) better than I do and correct me left, right and centre when I make mistakes. English is, as you know, their first language, not mine.]
Anthonie (Reference Anthonie2009) investigated the development of Afrikaans-English bilingualism in a rural and historically monolingual Afrikaans community in the Western Cape Karoo. She confirmed the trend found by Farmer (Reference Farmer2008) toward greater appreciation of the value of English. As one learner mentioned in response to a question about her language preference:
(9) English… the world is more open to you because nowadays most of the jobs is in English and stuff like that.
Thus even in rural communities there appears to be a gradual change in linguistic identity, from an almost exclusively (often stigmatised) Afrikaans identity to a (mostly proud) Afrikaans-English bilingual one. The stigmatised Coloured and Afrikaans identities appear to be products of South Africa's socio-political history of ethnic and cultural categorisation and segregation. Stigma on the one hand and exclusion on the other have led to a desire in the community Anthonie investigated to associate with two languages, rather than Afrikaans alone. Such a shift to an Afrikaans-English bilingual identity contrasts with the shift from predominantly Afrikaans monolingualism to the strongly English-dominant bilingualism found in the communities studied in urban Western Cape communities. Even with increased levels of bilingualism outside of the urban areas, Afrikaans remains a strong family language which is not likely to be replaced in the short term.
Conclusions
On the basis of the research reported here, a number of questions remain. Even though English has become the first language of a significant number of younger generation members of a formerly Afrikaans community, one needs to investigate ‘What English?’ Onraet (Reference Onraet2011) investigated the use of English as lingua franca used among L1 speakers of English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa in the Cape Town metropolitan area. Her findings were that even among those who identify themselves as English L1, there appears to be language change underway. Many of the new generation of English L1 speakers use some typical English L2 grammatical structures (see (9) above) which are apparently contact-induced. In such circumstances the changes appear to indicate the beginnings of a ‘New English’ in the sense of Platt, Weber and Ho (Reference Platt, Weber and Ho1984).
Interesting patterns of code-switching have been noted, as in (8) above. Where Afrikaans is the matrix language, more overt code-switching (‘classical code-switching’) is exhibited than when English is the matrix language (the ‘new L1’). As it stands now, the notion of ‘first language’ is no longer uncomplicated. High levels of bilingualism persist, even if it is an asymmetrical bilingualism that privileges English. It has become clear that perceptions of and attitudes towards ‘mixed language’ are different for different communities. On the one hand there is the covert prestige of the non-standard vernacular (Milroy & Milroy, Reference Milroy and Milroy1992), and on the other hand there are stigmatised versions of language from which speakers wish to detach themselves. In the South African context it is important to note how entrenched attitudes play a role in language choice. The particular reasons for the development of animosity may no longer apply, as where Afrikaans was the language associated with a former unpopular regime, while the emotional attitudes remain. So, a second or third generation, which did not itself experience first-hand the rejection and marginalisation associated with their particular sociolect, may still bear those negative attitudes.
Further research needs to be undertaken into the effects on Afrikaans of code-switching and the kind of shift observed in the Western Cape. Are new informal standards developing? Is there growing tolerance of accent and dialect difference? There is a public debate, mostly among the elites, which voices concerns about language loss in terms of standards and domains of use. This needs an approach that is much more sensitive to the histories of formally silenced voices. New research into the effects of code switching and language shift on English in the Western Cape is also essential. The debate on language change in the South African English of this region has a less prominent public profile. Nevertheless, questions of language standards, the stability of standard South African English and the emergence of new varieties in South Africa need to be addressed.
The social and sociolinguistic effects of the recorded shift, from Afrikaans as community language to a bilingual identity in which English is the preferred choice for mobility, need to be investigated. Even if in decline in many public domains such as in education, Afrikaans cannot be defined as a ‘vanishing voice’ (Nettle & Romaine, Reference Nettle and Romaine2000). To cite one of the young learners on what her choice for her own children would be:
(10) (I would choose not only English …) I think bilingual, strongly, but mostly on the English side. I won't like to take Afrikaans away from them.
An enduring impression at this stage in the study is that many speakers of Kaapse Afrikaans feel their sociolect is stigmatised, to the extent that they would prefer to distance themselves from it. Cape Flats English, on the other hand, is not similarly stigmatised. Speakers of the new version developing as the L1 of a younger generation seem to be unaware of how it deviates from either the South African or a UK standard. And even if alerted to the differences, speakers afford it considerably more prestige than the equivalent Afrikaans vernacular.
CHRISTINE ANTHONISSEN is Associate Professor in the Department of General Linguistics, Stellenbosch University. Her research focuses on typically South African discourses such as ones of censorship during the 1980s, public hearings on histories of violence in the 1990s and HIV-treatment since 2003. Currently she is investigating sociolinguistic aspects of bilingualism and multilingualism in a context where policy and practice do not suitably meet. Her interest is in the status of various South African languages in relation to English, widely used as a lingua franca in the country. Email: ca5@sun.ac.za
