Re: Volcae and Volsci

From: Rick McCallister
Message: 57036
Date: 2008-04-08

--- tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>
> > > Afrikaans is the mother tongue of a large black
> and colored
> > > population. In that population it started as a
> pidgin. Brian is
> > > now going to pronounce that he knew that
> already.
> > >
> > I'm wondering if Afrikaans is the same among the
> > Tswana and Coloured people who speak it.
>
> In one TV feature of nasty criminals in the SA
> prison system I could
> make out very little of the Afrikaans those street
> gang people used,
> from the Afrikaans of the wardens I could pick out a
> little more.
> There was obviously a large difference.
>
> BTW I heard from a white South African that SA
> English picked up words
> from Afrikaans like 'lekker' "nice". 'That's
> lecker!'.
>
>
> > I used to
> > work with a Tswana who was form Johannesburg. He
> told
> > me Afrikaans was his first language and he had to
> > learn Tswana from his grandparents, that most of
> the
> > Black population of the Rand cities spoke
> Afrikaans.
>
> I watch boxing occasionally on cable on ARD, the
> German first channel.
> Usually they they set up someone to translate what
> the challenger and
> his coach are talking about between rounds. Once
> they had to give up
> though, the challenger was a black South African and
> it turned out he
> talked with his coach in Afrikaans. The TV guys had
> automatically
> assumed they would be speaking English and not the
> supposed language
> of the oppressor, as the mostly Anglophone press
> wants it to be (they
> can never forgive the Boers for what they did to
> them in the Boer war).
>
> > But it would be interesting to know if it's really
> Afrikaans for a
> > pidgenized form.
>
> Erh, meaning...?
>
>
> Torsten
>
That came out odd. What I mean is that I wonder about
diglossia between Afrikaans and the various "Township
Pidgens" such as Totsi (sp?) and Fanagaló with
"middling" forms.
In Wikipedia they talk about 5-6 millions Afrikaans
speakers but I've been told by South Africans that
it's more like 10-12 million, that many ethnic Tswanas
and others in the cities actually speak Afrikaans
while putting down on forms that they speak their
ancestral languages even if they don't know a word.
From what I gather that seems to be true across Africa
--I read articles in the NY Times about that
phenomenon in Kenya where Luos in Nairobi could grew
up speaking Kikuyu but not Luo, etc.



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