Settler colonialism speaks

Abstract

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.

Grammatical Innovations in German in Multilingual Namibia: The Expanded Use of Linking Elements and Gehen ‘Go’ as a Future Auxiliary

“…‘kitchen German’ is a German-based variety that developed during German colonialism. Crucially, Kiche Duits never became an in-group language but was mainly employed for interethnic communication between the German colonists and their workers (Deumert 2009, 2017, 2018).…”

“…'kitchen German' is a German-based variety that developed during German colonialism. Crucially, Kiche Duits never became an in-group language but was mainly employed for interethnic communication between the German colonists and their workers (Deumert 2009(Deumert , 2017(Deumert , 2018. In this paper, we focus on the German spoken by the descendants of German colonists who settled in Namibia during and after the colonial times.…”