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Reports of the impending death of Afrikaans have been greatly exaggerated

Ismail Lagardien
By Ismail Lagardien
15 Oct 2024
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Afrikaans is a uniquely southern African language. At least six million people in South Africa and Namibia speak Afrikaans, and there are probably many more of us (coloured people) than there are white people who speak the language.

One of South Africa’s national languages is under threat of disappearing. Afrikaans may still be spoken and may outlive us – those of us who will still be kicking around for the next 25 to 30 years – but there is mild panic, some hysteria and general concern that Afrikaans is being relegated as a language of instruction, and demonised as a cultural or identity marker.

Briefly stated, at the outset, there are at least 6,000 languages currently in use around the world, and at least 500 that are extinct. So, we need to ask whether Afrikaans should be killed or left to die a natural death?

Let’s start with the unproblematic, possibly trite statement that the past, present and future of Afrikaans is woven into the country’s history which, never mind notions of exceptionalism, cannot be ripped from everything else going on in the world.

In one of those fits of rhetorical abuse to which we are prone, Afrikaans is described as “the language of the oppressor”. It is not without validity though. Language is never neutral and is almost always used as a weapon.

We should probably be more honest in our reflections. Much of the good and the bad that shapes the world today can be associated with languages and cultures of erstwhile oppressors, and erasure of the languages and cultures of others.

In his memoir, There Was a Country, Chinua Achebe warned about the danger of destroying cultures, and of imposing one culture over another. It could only lead to disaster. Notwithstanding all of these, I would insist that language is never neutral.

English was the language of British colonisation (and dominance and control) across most of the world; of hegemonic liberal capitalist globalisation over the last decades of the past century, when, in the name of “civilisation”, the genocidal maniacs who wiped out the indigenous people of North America (they were “savages”, Theodore Roosevelt said, who stood in the way of the “righteous of all wars” and settler colonial expansion); German was the language of the Nazis during World War 2, and of the Herero genocide; during the Soviet era, Russian was the language of forced assimilation of millions of central Asians across present-day Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

We would have to consider, also, the way that Songhay or Ayneha dominated during the Songhai Empire that controlled the trans-Saharan trade route; the way that Sanskrit dominated the Kemaharajaan Majapahit across South East Asia, and the Dutch/French/German of the Belgians who killed millions of people in central Africa.

If it does not affect us, it does not matter


All of that might be too inconvenient because it does not serve us here and now; it is not part of the (quite banal) propagated ideas of our time. We’re selective, in South Africa, and heavily influenced by a type of Ptolemaic parochialism, like that other country; everything that happens anywhere in the universe should necessarily revolve around us.

There is, nevertheless, a valid concern, especially among Afrikaners, that there is a type of forced language loss under way and that this is driven by ethno-nationalists and ethno-purists.

I always feel the need to make the point that “ethno” is used, here, in a broader sense and not to be associated with a specific ethnic group, but to depict more a general sense that if you’re not indigenous or native you don’t belong, and the power to determine who is or who is not indigenous or native rests with political powers and identity brokers.

Worse, still, it imagines a world where Africa is for Africans, Asia is for Asians, Europe is for Europeans, etc, and the “non” people have to “go back to where they came from” – even if said people have lived on the land for millennia.

Let’s just make like Superman and reverse the spin of the world back to a time when everything was just dandy.

All you have to do is make up stories of antediluvian and (egads!) prelapsarian ownership, then force people from their homes because your god gave you permission.

It gets messy, and as we have seen from history, defining people as non-entities, telling them that they don’t belong, and removing “the impure” from the land, then expanding territory to make room (lebensraum) for a select group, has been bloody.

The Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung forced “political conformity in all sectors, from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education”. Stripping people of their language is part of this control of culture and education.

One recent example beyond South Africa was when, in 2018, the state of Israel abandoned Hebrew and Arabic as official languages, and declared Hebrew the sole official language, and relegated Arabic to “special status”. In that country, Hebrew is also the lingua sancta (like Arabic in Saudi Arabia), which makes it untouchable, and placing it beyond secular scrutiny. The ulpan, immediate immersion in Hebrew, is a required first-stop for all new immigrants to Israel.

Afrikaans is a uniquely southern African language. At least six million people in South Africa and Namibia speak Afrikaans, and not all of them are direct (and pure) descendants of European colonisers and settlers.

There are probably many more of us (coloured people) who speak Afrikaans than there are white people who speak the language, and there are indigenous language groups that have adopted Afrikaans words, if only as colloquialisms.

There are two issues that I want to discuss. The first is the reportedly wilful closure of Afrikaans-language instruction schools, the other is the social and historical decline of the language.

A natural death or a killing?


With all the above as a more broad sweep, there has been a policy, driven with the best intentions by a constitutional need, to ensure access to mother-tongue instruction/education and giving preference to indigenous African languages where there has been neglect for decades.

What becomes of Afrikaans? It is, after all, a national language. As we have seen with the examples above, states or orders tend to be totalitarian about language preferences. We should not skirt around the issue that Afrikaans was a weapon for control, discipline and punishment. This probably applies to all languages that aspire to “taking over” or “setting standards” of acceptability (by force) through policies like Hitler’s Gleichschaltung. (See here, here, here and here).

The politics of revenge is one of the wood joints that hold together the policy planks of the Progressive Caucus (and that seems to appeal to people like Panyaza Lesufi and Andile Lungisa, among others) in South Africa.

In this imagination, the children of today have to be punished for the sins of their parents who were European colonists and settler colonists, or other “non-Africans”. People of mixed heritage or mixed-race people are “non-Africans” so their language and culture really do not have a future in state and society, at least not in terms of biblical punishments or the politics of revenge.

How far is South Africa from declaring Afrikaans as merely deserving of “special status” and not a national language? Will policies force the extinction of Afrikaans, or will it die a natural death. We just don’t know what the future holds for any language.

Currently, there are 573 known extinct languages. These are languages that are no longer spoken or studied. Many of these were local dialects with no records of their alphabet or wording. These are probably forever lost. Others were major languages of their time, but social change has simply left them behind.

By one reliable account, the world added 230 extinct languages between 1950 and 2010. Today, one-third of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers. It is estimated that between 50% and 90% of languages are expected to disappear by the next century.

My guess is that Afrikaans will probably decrease in appeal and application. My generation spoke Afrikaans as a mother tongue, while my nephews and nieces all speak English as their first language. It’s just as well; they may not be employable in South Africa, but they flourish elsewhere in the world.

As part of a national effort, South Africa’s languages, cultures, customs, rituals and traditions should probably be taken seriously with the heavy caveat that things change, and change is good.

I am not a romantic idealist (!) and necessarily pessimistic about the future, so I take no explicit position either way. DM

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