Abstract

KOTZE, Ernst F. Voices from the East: The Cape kaleidoscope. Tydskr. geesteswet. [online]. 2025, vol.65, n.1, pp.133-151. ISSN 2224-7912.  https://doi.org/10.17159/2224-7912/2025/v65n1a7.

The basis of this article is the insight into the intra- and extralinguistic factors pertaining to the genesis of Afrikaans in the light of recent research and a reinterpretation of existingfindings. It seeks to provide answers to, amongst others, the question of the mutual intelligibility (particularly in written texts) of present-day Dutch and Afrikaans, in spite of considerable differences between the two languages. The focus is particularly on the multilingual context of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) presence both at the Cape of Good Hope and in the East, and the resulting forms (with specific reference to Dutch and Malay) which in due course played a role in the formation of different varieties of Afrikaans. In various areas around the globe where colonial languages such as English, French and Dutch were introduced and maintained, radical changes in the form of language which emanated from the contact situation led to stratified creole continuums, such as Negerhollands (also known in English as Virgin Island Dutch Creole - see www.diecreoltaal.com), Maurisien and Tok Pisin. The variety closest to the "original" colonial language, namely the acrolect (or "higher form", to be distinguished from the mesolect and the basilect), seems to have been maintained, in particular in its written form and for formal use, in the course of the development of Afrikaans. The question now arises why, unlike Maurisien in relation to French, the orthography of Afrikaans and the syntax, after more than three and a half centuries, still has so much in common with Dutch, even though both languages have undergone significant modifications over the centuries. Two processes seem to have been interacting during the dominance of the VOC in both East India and at the Cape: (1) Dutch was the language of administration and governance, and as such a lingua franca which had to be acquired by all inhabitants, of whatever language background, in their dealings with both the authorities and the man/woman in the street. This is referred to by Mufwene as the founder's principle. (2) Malay (spoken by Malaysians, Indonesians, and a host of East Indian speech communities) was the lingua franca of trade and commerce, but also of religion (written in the Arabic alphabet, called Jawi), and hence facilitated interlingual communication. VOC officials had to recognise this fact, and adapted their speech (Dutch) to what they perceived to be understandable to speakers of Malay. This is referred to as Grice 's cooperative principle. In this way, some linguistic adaptations occurred, such as morphological and phonological simplification, which resulted in forms which coincided with distinctive features of early Afrikaans in the mouths of both Malay speakers and VOC officials - something that was strengthened by both the arrival of Malay-speaking slaves at the Cape and the accommodation of so-called "home voyagers", viz VOC officials returning to Europe, who remained at the Cape in large numbers on the homeward journey to Europe. This form of Dutch is also described as Austro-Dutch. The hypothesis is that this two-way stream of influence was already in place before the language development at the Cape between colonial, or Austro-Dutch, on the one hand and Malay on the other. The hypothesis states, in summary, that Austro-Dutch, the Oceanic variety of colonial Dutch, which itself also showed variation, played a significant part as a catalyst in the development of Afrikaans. What is important to note, is that various characteristics ascribable to language transfer from Malay or cooperative adaptations (by Dutch-speaking officials), are present in various forms of Afrikaans (varieties) and as such function as distinctive features by means of which the varieties can be recognised, while others are common to the language of the speech community as a whole. Failure to note these distinctions, at various levels of linguistic description, can, and does, often lead to oversimplifications regarding the nature of the language as a whole. A correlative of the role played by Malay at the Cape is the fact that Afrikaans, or Cape Dutch, was initially written in the Jawi (Arabic) alphabet, as was Malay, some years before the Roman alphabet was employed to reduce to writing the speech of speakers of Afrikaans. This was simply due to the fact that Jawi was well-known to Malay slaves imported from the East Indies, and the Jawi alphabet was hence employed to write religious instruction books and also secular texts to represent the Cape Dutch pronunciation. However, even after the romanisation of the Arabic/Jawi script, the lexicon of the Cape Muslim community has retained a considerable number of Malay terms, although many of these are being replaced by Arabic equivalents (compare tramakassie "thank you" in Malay with shukran in Arabic), because of exposure to Arabic during the hajj and other Islamic areas of contact. As a result of an increase in interest regarding the role of Malay in the formation of Afrikaans, some Malay scholars in Indonesia and other Oceanic countries, scholars such as Hoogervorst and Witton, made contributions by means of their research in the recent past, and have thus enriched the body of knowledge on this count, in addition to testing the findings of researchers based in South Africa. They have also pointed the way to open new avenues of research which are accessible in archives in The Hague, Colombo and Jakarta.

Keywords : Afrikaans; Austro-Dutch; Bahasa Indonesia; Bahasa Melayu; Cooperative principle; DEIC; Founder principle; Intralingual variation; Jawi; Language transfer; Levels of language description; Malay; Rumi.

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