Namibian<i>Kiche Duits</i>: The Making (and Decline) of a Neo-African Language

Deumert, Ana

doi:10.1017/s1470542709990122

Cited by 62 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…(Following the Second World War, Germany lost her colonies, but the traces of the language can still be felt in what today is Namibia, cf. Deumert 2009 on Kiche Duits ). Although these languages were primarily used by a tiny elite for administrative purposes, they have remained in use as official languages in most countries, even throughout the post‐independence era.…”

Section: English In Contexts Of Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards developmental world Englishes

Bolton¹,

Graddol²,

Meierkord³

2011

World Englishes

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Over the last three decades scholars promoting the world Englishes paradigm (WE) have worked towards establishing a more positive attitude towards international varieties of English. However, despite the best intentions of Western linguists working in this field, there is an obvious imbalance between the developed and developing world in many contexts of English language education. Educators and teachers in many Outer Circle and Expanding Circle contexts face difficulties in terms of conditions, facilities, and resources very different from those of Western institutions. Academics in developing societies have parallel difficulties in publishing research, both in journals and in books with international publishers, while local options for publishing are often restricted. This paper suggests a number of ways in which linguists and other scholars might begin to engage with a range of issues related to 'developmental world Englishes'.

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Section: English In Contexts Of Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards developmental world Englishes

Bolton¹,

Graddol²,

Meierkord³

2011

World Englishes

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“…In The Languages of Namibia, for example, Jouni Maho (1998: 170) asserted confidently that "the German language does not seem to have spread much outside of the German population". Yet, as I have shown (Deumert 2003(Deumert , 2009 this assessment is incorrect, and German has been part of the linguistic repertoires of black Namibians since around 1900. 4 Unserdeutsch ('our German', also called Rabaul Creole German in the literature) emerged in the boarding school context at the Vunapope Catholic Mission.…”

Section: Between Choice and Necessitymentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Importantly, Kiche Duits, or any other variety of Namibian (black) German (cf. Deumert 2009), never became an in-group language, and speakers maintained their ancestral or heritage languages throughout. These include: Otjiherero, Oshiwambo (a cluster of closely related varieties), Khoekhoegowab (also called Nama) and Afrikaans.…”

Section: Between Choice and Necessitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is in the after-war years, that Namibian (black) German took shape, always in tandem with other cultural practices of the contact zone. These included not only top hats but also the wearing of German-style military uniforms by men, and colourful colonial dresses by women (for further discussion see Deumert 2009). These practicesways of dressing and ways of speakingemerged in the aftermath of the war and, especially, in urban spaces.…”

Section: Meaning-making: Between Mimesis and Mimicrymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Settler colonialism speaks

Deumert

2018

Self Cite

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In this article I explore a particular set of contact varieties that emerged in Namibia, a former German colony. Historical evidence comes from the genre of autobiographic narratives that were written by German settler women. These texts provide – ideologically filtered – descriptions of domestic life in the colony and contain observations about everyday communication practices. In interpreting the data I draw on the idea of ‘jargon’ as developed within creolistics as well as on Chabani Manganyi’s (1970) comments on the ‘master-servant communication complex’, and Beatriz Lorente’s (2017) work on ‘scripts of servitude’. I suggest that to interpret the historical record is a complex hermeneutic endeavour: on the one hand, the examples given are likely to tell us ‘something’ about communication in the colony; on the other hand, the very description of communicative interactions is rooted in what I call a ‘script of supremacy’, which is quite unlike the ‘atonement politics’ (McIntosh 2014) of postcolonial language learning.

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“…Orosz (2011) investigates the interaction (and conflicts) between the German colonial government and locally active mission societies with respect to language policy in colonial Cameroon. Deumert 2009;Kellermeier-Rehbein 2012;Shah 2007). Colonial German Southwest Africa (Namibia) receives special consideration in linguistic research because here, German is still spoken natively by c. 20,000 speakers and also to some degree as an intergenerationally transmitted second language (cf.…”

Section: German Language Regulations In Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

German in the Pacific: Language policy and language planning

Stolberg¹

2015

Koloniallinguistik

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During the second half of the 19th century, extended regions of the South Pacific came to be part of the German colonial empire. The colonial administration included repeated and diverse efforts to implement German as the official language in several settings (administration, government, education) in the colonial areas. Due to unfamiliar sociological and linguistic conditions, to competition with English as a(nother) prestigious colonizer language, and to the short time-span of the German colonial rule, these efforts rendered only little language-related effect. Nevertheless, some linguistic traces remained, and these seem to reflect in what areas language implementation was organized most thoroughly. The study combines two directions of investigation: First, taking a historical approach, legal and otherwise official documents and information are considered in order to understand how the implementation process was planned and (intended to be) carried out. Second, from a linguistic perspective, documented lexical borrowings and other traces of linguistic contact are identified that can corroborate the historical findings by reflecting a greater effect of contact in such areas where the implementation of German was carried out most strictly. The goal of this paper is, firstly, to trace the political and missionary activities in language planning with regard to German in the colonial Pacific, rather similar to a modern language policy scenario when a new code of prestige or national unity is implemented. Secondly, these activities are evaluated in the face of the outcome that can be observed, in the historical practice as well as in long-term effects of language contact up until today.|| 1 This paper is based on a joint presentation by Stefan Engelberg (IDS Mannheim) and the author, held at the Seventh International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, University of Bremen (Germany), March 2012. Thanks go to Stefan Engelberg for preparing substantial parts of the presentation, especially regarding remuneration policies and the categorization of loanwords with respect to planning effects. Further thanks go to our student research assistent, Ineke Scholz, for categorizing the loanwords into semantic fields.

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NamibianKiche Duits: The Making (and Decline) of a Neo-African Language

Cited by 62 publications

References 44 publications

Towards developmental world Englishes

Towards developmental world Englishes

Settler colonialism speaks

German in the Pacific: Language policy and language planning

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