Berkeley -- A course at the University of California at Berkeley is dispelling the myth that Afrikaans is simply the language of white oppressors during South Africa's apartheid era.
Several universities in the United States teach people how to speak Afrikaans. But "Afrikaans after Apartheid: Language and Culture in Conflict in South Africa," is a UC Berkeley course that explores the history and development of the language.
Actually, said Van Deusen-Scholl, Afrikaans has multilingual roots and a diversity of speakers and dialects. Today, between 5 and 6 million people speak Afrikaans, and more than half of them are people of color. Many of them speak dialects of standard Afrikaans, which is spoken mainly by whites, and are part of a movement to foster appreciation of these dialects.
"There is tremendous pride among people of color about Afrikaans because they speak it -- it is their language," said Van Deusen-Scholl.
South Africa has 11 official languages. According to the most recent census there, the top two are the indigenous African languages of Zulu and Xhosa, with Afrikaans the third most spoken language. English is the sixth most widely spoken language in South Africa, but most bilingual people use English as a second language.
The roots of the language are controversial, but Van Deusen-Scholl said Afrikaans was strongly influenced by Dutch and other languages. She said that 95 percent of its words and vocabulary are related to Dutch.
In 1652, the Dutch arrived in South Africa to set up a base for their East India Company, known as the VOC. Within their first decade of settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, a strategic outpost on the route to trade empires in the East, they brought slaves from places including Madagascar, Angola, the south of India and the Indonesian archipelago.
Van Deusen-Scholl believes that the Dutch settlers' contacts with such a diverse population of slaves, free tribes -- especially the Khoi-Khoi, a nomadic South African group -- and French and German settlers, formed the roots of Afrikaans. By 1775, Afrikaans was "the main language of communication" and had begun spreading as people migrated beyond the Cape.
Afrikaans became an important part of the identity of the Boers, a group of Dutch farmers who also settled in South Africa.
"The Boers developed into the population we now know as Afrikaners," she said. "For them, it became their language, especially in the face of the British, who became rapidly dominant -- along with the English language -- during the 1800s."
Stigmatized by the upper classes as ignorant and non-educated, the Boers fought back by refusing to speak English and by developing a nationalistic, Afrikaner-focused identity.
"The arrival of the British led to a consciousness on the part of the Boers that Afrikaans was the language of the settlers who had been there previously," said Van Deusen-Scholl. "A number of groups appeared toward the late 19th century with writings and organizations that promoted Afrikaans as a language equal to English in status."
Copyright H. David Marshak, All Rights Reserved
