Katanga Swahili and Heerlen Dutch: A sociohistorical and linguistic comparison of contact varieties in mining regions

Abstract

This article compares sociolinguistic and structural outcomes of language contact processes in two mining areas on two different continents, namely the Katanga region in the southeast of what is now the DR Congo, Africa and Heerlen as centre of the former Eastern Mine District in the southeastern province of Limburg in the Netherlands, Europe. Several similarities between these two regions make this comparison interesting. Both in Katanga and Heerlen, the natural copper and coal resources were located in border regions that were peripheral to central seats of government. In both regions, the exploitation of these resources, the growth of mining industries and rapid urbanization, began in the same period, the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Despite being located on different continents – Africa and Europe – similar social conditions of language contact were responsible for the genesis of the language varieties underground and above ground. The language contact situations in Limburg and Katanga both resulted in structural innovation of Dutch and Swahili respectively. The most interesting innovation we identify in both cases can be characterized as the regularization of grammatical properties, and the expansion of aspect marking.

In the name of security: Governmentality apparatus in a multilingual mine in Arctic Finland

“…The previous research on language and mining has illustrated the long history of language contact and multilingual practices in mining communities (Aikman, 2017; Cornips & de Rooij, 2019; Hiss, 2017; Marzo, 2019; Muysken, 2019). The present study contributes to this research strand in the context of the current globalized mining industry.…”

“…Most of the research on language issues in mining has addressed historical cases (e.g. Cornips & de Rooij, 2019; Hiss, 2017; Marzo, 2019; Muysken, 2019). Ethnographic studies are rare, probably because gaining access to mining projects is challenging due to strict security procedures (see, however, Aikman, 2017; Bell, 2017; Kraft, 2020).…”

Language contact in a mining community

“…Although the language use of mining communities has been the focus of several studies (Mesthrie 1989;Muysken 2019;Cornips & De Rooij 2019;Álvarez López 2019;Braber 2019;Devlin et al 2019), Cité Duits remained a blind spot in sociolinguistics research until recently. There has been no fine-grained linguistic analysis of either Cité Duits or the language use of this particular community, which encompasses secondgeneration immigrants of European descent born and raised in Eisden in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as their children.…”