Present-Day Afrikaans in Contact with English

Researching South African Englishes

“…To the extent that the Afrikaans‐speaking population of European descent and the English settler population interacted more closely throughout the 19th and 20th century, they formed a speech community of sorts from which certain forms of language variation and change emerged, alongside contested identity and ideological positions, bearing in mind that large sections of these two populations were engaged in a bitter three‐year war, the Anglo‐Boer War of 1899–1902. Mutual influences can be traced in the two languages throughout the two centuries in which they have been in contact (Van Rooy, 2019; Wasserman, 2019), with negative attitudes always persisting from both sides throughout the 20th century, and traces of Afrikaans in the pronunciation of English being a marker of so‐called Extreme or Broad South African English, to which attitudes remained negative in the English‐speaking community (Lanham, 1996). Thus, while the interaction between these groups was extensive, they did not come to form a unified group, even if they were grouped together for many purposes by the racial policies in the apartheid years.…”

South African English Impact on Cultural Identity Formation and Intercultural Communication

“…Among borrowings from English that survive in other RSA languages, in particular Afrikaans, loan translations are dominant due to the competition between these two languages and a strong tendency to linguistic purism in Afrikaans environment (see [38,41,47]). Obviously, it is for social reasons that the dependence of Afrikaans on English is notable in swear-words (blerrie "bloody"), farewells (koebaai "goodbye") [41, p. 209 .…”