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The present bibliography of African languages and linguistics includes not only works relating to the "Negro-African" languages, but also those dealing with the African varieties of Arabic, the Hamitic languages, Malagasy, Afrikaans, and various Creoles. (The greater part of the entries relate to the indigenous languages of the African continent south of the Sahara.) The linguistic classification employed is that represented in the several African-language taxonomies published by the International African Institute. Included are only works dealing specifically or primarily with language: titles exclusively or chiefly anthropological or ethnographic in character are strictly excluded. Many of the titles are extremely rare; the existence of reprints is noted in cases where these were available at the date of publication. Languages and dialects, and authors/compilers are indexed in the appendix. (AMM)

Die Bybelvertaling van 2020 neem kennis van die funksionalistiese vertaalmodel van Christiane Nord (1997, 2001) as beoordelingsraamwerk wat die funksie(s) wat dit bedoel is om te vervul, vooropstel. Hierdie funksie, soos verwoord in die vertaalopdrag (skopos) van die opdraggewer, hou in dat die vertaalde teks sowel bronkultuur-georiënteerd as eietyds qua taalgebruik moet wees. 'n Belangrike riglyn is die nosie van 'n "direkte" vertaling, waarvolgens die bronteks nie deur die vertaler geïnterpreteer moet word nie, maar die leser direk aanspreek, as sou die skrywer die teks in die ontvangertaal geskryf het. Een terrein wat egter wel 'n mate van interpretasie noodsaak, is die gebruik van tweedepersoonsvoornaamwoorde as aanspreekvorm. Die keuse van so 'n voornaamwoord word dikwels bepaal deur die verhouding tussen die spreker en die aangesprokene, wat in Afrikaans uitgedruk word deur die keuse tussen 'n formele vorm (u) en 'n informele vorm (jy/jou/julle), 'n onderskeid wat nie in die brontale gemaak word nie (vgl. Unseth 2020). In die literatuur word daar na sulke vorme in verskillende tale verwys met behulp van die afkortings V (van die Latyn vos - 'u') en T (Latyn tu - 'jy'). Hierdie artikel fokus dan spesifiek op die keuses wat in Afrikaans gemaak word tussen V en T. Dit is egter nie slegs faktore soos formaliteit of sosiale asimmetrie tussen die spreker en aangesprokene nie, maar ook houdings en emosies wat deur die keuse tussen V en T weerspieël kan word. Volgens 'n artikel van Brown en Gilman (2003) dui die aanspreekvariante (V en T) onderskeidelik 'n dinamika van gesag of mag (V) en 'n dinamika van solidariteit (T) aan. Hierdie onderskeid in die vertaling noodsaak 'n transposisie van die historiese werklikheid in die Bybelse brontekste na 'n Afrikaanstalige perspektief. Die artikel illustreer dit aan die hand van bepaalde tekste, bring dit in verband met die wyse waarop tale soos Nederlands, Engels, Duits en Noors dié verhoudings weergee, en tref 'n vergelyking, vanuit taalhistoriese perspektief, tussen die wyse waarop opeenvolgende Afrikaanse Bybelvertalings deur die Bybelgenootskap sulke verwysings hanteer in die Evangelie van Matteus. THEORETICAL CONTEXT: The Afrikaans Bible translation of 2020 took cognisance of Christiane Nord 's (1997, 2001) functionalistic model of translation, in conjunction with Reiss and Vermeer's (1984) skopos theory. A function of this translation, in addition to the aim of providing an authoritative basis for the faith of its readership, was to ensure that the source text is presented as an authentic representation of the culture(s) in which it originated, as well as being understood clearly by the target readers of today, in due regard of the text genre of the relevant source text (such as narrative, poetry, prophetic enunciations, wisdom literature, genealogical register). This is articulated in the skopos, or translation mandate by the initiator, it is the Bible Society of South Africa. This mandate was further informed by Gutt's (1991) notion of a "direct" translation, in that the source text is not interpreted and indirectly reported by the translator as narrator, but addresses the reader directly, as though the author had written the text in the receiving language. The intended function would then be to empower the translated text with the same status and authority as the source text. ADDRESS FORMS: One aspect of the translation process does, however, require a degree of interpretation on the linguistic level, namely the use of second person pronouns as a form of address in Afrikaans. The choice of an appropriate pronoun is often determined or influenced by the relation between the speaker and the addressee (which may vary through time), such as the relative social position of the interlocutors, and the style of the dialogue, and can be generalised to a binary distinction between a formal (u) and an informal address form (jy). This choice does not, however, reflect only factors such as formality or social asymmetry between speaker and addressee, as mentioned above, but also attitudes and emotions, such as respect, solidarity or disdain, or even strategies to achieve a particular speech act objective (illocution). In the literature (Brown & Gilman 2003), the abbreviations V (from the Latin vos) and T (from tu) have been introduced to refer to such forms in various languages, and are indicative of a dynamic of power (or authority) and a dynamic of solidarity, respectively. The article traces the origin of this distinction from the era of the Holy Roman Empire to the emergence of this phenomenon in the European languages, inluding English and Dutch. INITIAL CAPITALS: A further complication is that the Afrikaans translation, following the tradition of the seventeenth-century Dutch Statenvertaling, also utilises an orthographical marker, namely an (intrasentential) initial capital to indicate respect toward the Divinity in appellations of God, as well as in pronouns referring to God as subject or object of a sentence. The source texts do not contain any overt (orthographical) features indicating such reverence, since capitals are not distinguished in Hebrew, and in Greek, only proper nouns are capitalised as a rule. This then amounts to another level of distinction, in particular in relation to addressing Jesus as human being, but at the same time recognising his divine nature. APPLICATION: In this article, the application of these criteria is illustrated with reference to a number of selected verses in both the Old and New Testaments in Afrikaans. Secondly, since Afrikaans and Dutch share a history of applying pragmatic criteria in order to indicate such distinctions, a comparison is made between recent translations of relevant verses to determine the similarities and/or differences in address forms. Finally, with reference to the Gospel of Matthew, consecutive translations in Afrikaans from 1895 to 2020 are compared to determine how address forms in this language evolved over time, something which also reflects in a limited way a change in societal traditions.

Slides for the Global Outlook :: Digital Humanities seminar.&nbsp

What are called ‘natural languages’ are artificial, often politically instituted and regulated, phenomena; a more accurate picture of speech practices around the globe is of a multidimensional continuum. This essay asks what the implications of this understanding of language are for translation, and focuses on the variety of Afrikaans known as Kaaps, which has traditionally been treated as a dialect rather than a language in its own right. An analysis of a poem in Kaaps by Nathan Trantraal reveals the challenges such a use of language constitutes for translation. A revised understanding of translation is proposed, relying less on the notion of transfer of meaning from one language to another and more on an active engagement with the experience of the reader. Derek Attridge, ‘Untranslatability and the Challenge of World Literature: A South African Example’, in The Work of World Literature, ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, Cultural Inquiry, 19 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 25-56

Background: Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) can enable individuals with little or no functional speech to communicate functionally in a variety of communication contexts. AAC systems for individuals who are not (yet) fully literate often require that the vocabulary for the system be preselected. By including the most commonly- and most frequently-used words (core vocabulary) in an AAC system, access to novel utterance generation can arguably be facilitated. At present, no Afrikaans core vocabulary list based on children’s speech samples exists. Objectives: This study aimed to identify the most frequently- and commonly-used words of South African Afrikaans-speaking Grade R learners without disabilities. Method: Spontaneous speech samples were collected from 12 Afrikaans-speaking Grade R learners during regular preschool activities. Samples were transcribed and analysed to determine the number of different words used, the frequency with which each word was used, as well as the commonality of word use across the 12 participants. Results: A total of 239 words met the criteria for inclusion in the core vocabulary (words used with a frequency of more than 0.05% in the sample, and used by at least half of the participants). These words accounted for 79.4% of words used in the entire speech sample. Conclusion: The established core vocabulary consists of a relatively small set of words that was found to represent a large proportion of speech. AAC team members may consider including these words on Afrikaans AAC systems that are intended to give access to a measure of novel utterance generation.

The paper presents an analysis of the Afrikaans degree modifier baie ‘very/much/many’. Baie appears to be a single lexical item with a wide distribution in terms of the categories of gradable predicate with which it can combine. However, the paper shows that two syntactically distinct instances of baie should be distinguished. These instances of baie portion out the modification of different grammatical categories between them: one, a head, exclusively modifies gradable adjectives, and the other, an adjunct, modifies the remaining categories of gradable predicate.

The main purpose of this paper is to present arguments for the existence of a certain relation between formal gender features and the semantic notions ‘count noun’ and ‘mass noun’. In particular, facts relating to how NP ellipsis operates in indefinite DPs in Dutch and Afrikaans are taken to provide evidence for the proposed relation.Keywords: NP ellipsis, gender, countability, Dutch, Afrikaans

Whilst literature on the acquisition of passive constructions by speakers of European languages abounds, there is a dearth of grammatical descriptions of passive constructions in (especially South) African languages that may serve as a basis for acquisition studies. Furthermore, the majority of studies have focused on monolingual participants only, leaving the typical multilingual African language acquisition context underrepresented. This paper addresses these gaps in the literature by offering an in-depth cross-linguistic comparison of passive constructions in the three official languages of the Western Cape, a province in South Africa, namely the Germanic languages English and Afrikaans and the Southern Bantu language isiXhosa. The grammatical description of passives in these languages covers the nature of the passive verb complex; the placement of the object and, in long passives, subject arguments; movement of the object argument across clause boundaries in infinitival clauses; existential passive constructions; case assignment; restrictions on passivisation; and verbal versus adjectival passive constructions. This information may serve as basis for finer syntactic analyses, studies of cross-linguistic bootstrapping, and also descriptive grammars. The paper finally presents normative data for the acquisition of passive constructions by monolingual speakers of English and by speakers of languages closely related to Afrikaans and isiXhosa (such data not yet being readily available for the latter two languages). The reported higher frequency of passive constructions in Bantu languages is cited as a possible explanation for the relatively early acquisition of this otherwise notoriously late-acquired construction.Keywords: acquisition, Afrikaans, English, isiXhosa, passive constructions

Languages like Afrikaans are sometimes said to feature a class of adpositions that can be described as “intransitive” (e.g. binne “inside”, bo “upstairs”, agter “in the back”, buite “outside”, onder “downstairs” voor “in the front”). It is argued that such elements in fact instantiate a “hybrid” category – the locative noun category – which is not missing a Ground external argument but is actually lexicalising the nominal structure associated with that Ground argument itself. Such locative nouns pattern with R-pronouns and home-class nouns and therefore probably share a similar internal structure with these better-studied elements of language.Keywords: intransitive adposition, axial part, locative noun, R-pronoun, syncretism, Afrikaans

Speakers of German and Afrikaans have been interacting with one another in Southern Africa for over three hundred and fifty years. In this study, the linguistic results of this intra-Germanic contact are addressed and divided into two sections: 1) the influence of German (both Low and High German) on Cape Dutch/Afrikaans in the years 1652-1810; and 2) the influence of Afrikaans on Namibian German in the years 1840-present. The focus here has been on the lexicon, since lexemes are the first items to be borrowed in contact situations, though other grammatical borrowings come under scrutiny as well.The guiding principle of this line of inquiry is how the cognitive phenonemon of Herbartian apperception, or, Peircean abduction, has driven the bulk of the borrowings between the languages. Apperception is, simply put, the act of identifying a new perception as analogous to a previously existing one. The following central example to this dissertation will serve to illustrate this. When Dutch, Low German, and Malay speakers were all in contact in Capetown in the 1600 and 1700s, there were three mostly homophonous and synonymous words they were using. The Dutch knew banjer 'very', the Low Germans knew banni(g) 'very, tremendous, extraordinary', and the Malays knew banja(k) 'many, a lot, often, very'. All of these words can be considered the source for the modern Afrikaans hybrid word baie 'many, much, often, very', based on earlier banja or banje. These two forms are very close in sound and meaning to banjer, banni(g), and banja(k), and consequently when, for example, a Malay speaker heard a Low German say banni(g), he apperceived it as Malay banja(k). Likewise when a Low German speaker heard the Dutch word banjer, he apperceived it is as banni(g), and so on with all potential interlocutors. The ultimate form of the word is a compromise hybrid between them all, namely banje, which was motivated by the ease with which these three source words were apperceived by the respective speakers, as well as by their semantic similarity, which was also easily apperceived. Bearing in mind the workings of apperception, Cape Dutch/Afrikaans and Namibian German are perfect case studies for intra-Germanic linguistic contact. Parallel developments, whether arrived at independently or by shared genesis, will reinforce one another when brought into contact, a situation which must have played itself out all throughout the history of contact between Germanic languages. Whether it was Burgundian influence on Franconian, Old Frisian on Old English, Danish on Faroese, or Dutch on East Frisian, the role of apperception must have been great in these cases of linguistic contact, whether we can show it or not, as is the problem with Langobardic, Vandalic, Burgundian and, to a lesser extent, Franconian. In the case of German and Afrikaans in Southern Africa, the well-documented archival and printed texts put the linguist in a favorable position to examine and elucidate the nature of this linguistic contact, as one will note in the study at hand.

A corpus exploration of huidiglik . In tandem with Van Huyssteen (2018a ), this article examines the current usage of the word huidiglik (‘currently’) (an alleged Anglicism), together with other associated words (e.g. its base, huidig ‘current’). Based on a comprehensive literature review, Van Huyssteen (2018a ) concludes that apart from stylistic preferences, none of the linguistic arguments against huidiglik holds water. In this article, a corpus exploration of some of the issues pertaining to huidiglik is undertaken. Based on evidence from a large variety of corpora, we conclude that huidiglik has become well-established in Afrikaans over the past four decades, both in formal texts and informal chat language. Since it does not displace any of its often-prescribed synonyms (like tans, deesdae , or teenswoordig ), it confirms that arguments for its status as an Anglicism is rather thin. Although the inflected form huidige is mostly used as prenominal adjective, its uninflected form is also used with noticeable frequency as adverb and predicative adjective. Huidiglik , however, is used almost exclusively as adverb, rarely as inflected attributive adjective, but never as predicative adjective. Lastly, it is shown that adverbialising ⋅lik occurs with high frequency in Afrikaans, but it is not very productive. In addition, it is illustrated that ⋅ig⋅lik is an entrenched suffix pairing.

Norms of huidiglik. In Afrikaans, huidiglik is a truly Janus-faced word: it is being used with high frequency in especially spoken language, while at the same time being one of the biggest language pet-peeves of language practitioners (and even ordinary speakers of Afrikaans). When asked why huidiglik should be avoided, these language practitioners and language users often cannot provide any reasoning about it. A comprehensive literature review also reveals that linguists and language practitioners often give contradictory, or even linguistically incorrect reasons for why huidiglik is supposedly not acceptable in (standard) Afrikaans. By comparing a variety of normative grammaticographic sources (such as reference guides and prescriptive grammars), this article shows that: (1) huidiglik originated, on a balance of probability, in the 1970s in the South African Parliament; and (2) apart from stylistic preferences (e.g. that it sounds pretentious, feigned and affectatious), none of the linguistic arguments against huidiglik holds water. In a supplementary article in this issue of the journal it is being illustrated that huidiglik is alive and well in written (Standard) Afrikaans.

It has been convincingly argued that the so-called “left periphery” of the sentence makes available multiple positions which host topicalised and focalised phrases, among other elements. Projections in the C-domain have been shown to have a fixed ordering, the violation of which results in ungrammaticality. Rizzi (1997) provides a template that specifies this ordering. Botha and Oosthuizen (2009) examine this template’s ability to account for ordering phenomena in the Afrikaans left periphery and make certain necessary adjustments to Rizzi’s template to account for their data. This short paper takes Botha and Oosthuizen’s observations regarding the (im)possibility of a certain ordering in the Afrikaans CP as a case in point. Broadly put, the paper’s premise is that although the template provided for the Afrikaans CP may be descriptively adequate, in that it can accommodate and predict possible orderings, it falls short in that it does not account for why such a template should exist. That is, the template itself does not explain why certain orderings are permissible and others are not. It is the paper’s modest aim to test the ability of one theoretical perspective, namely Grohmann’s (2003) theory of anti-locality, to account for the illegality of a particular ordering in the Afrikaans CP. Anti-locality’s ban on ‘too local’ movement is shown to predict the illicitness of this ordering. Due to the paper’s limited scope, the analysis is not extended to other constructions. Its aim is to prompt further efforts to account for the observed ordering in the CP domain, and it offers the theory of anti-locality as a possible starting point for these efforts.Keywords: Afrikaans, left periphery, anti-locality

Scientific research within the humanities is different from what it was a few decades ago. Forinstance, new sources of information, such as digital grammars, lexical databases and largecorpora of real-language data offer new opportunities for linguistics. The Taalportaal gram-matical database, with its links to other linguistic resources via the CLARIN infrastructure,is a prime example of a new type of tool for linguistic research.

This study investigated the effect of mother tongue instruction and gender on second language acquisition using a causal-comparative quantitative research design. The two distinguishing groups compared were (i) learners that were taught in their mother tongue (Afrikaans) and (ii) learners that were not taught in their mother tongue but in English, from grades 1 to 3. The dependent variable was the second language acquisition that was accounted for by the learners’ performance in grade 5 in three tests: a vocabulary, a syntax and an oral communication test. The sample included 2 schools in Windhoek and a total of 70 learners, with 35 learners that had Afrikaans as medium of instruction, and 35 learners that had English as medium of instruction from grades 1 to 3. The study aimed to shed some light on the ongoing debate as to whether mother tongue instruction or immersion in L2 is more beneficial for the child’s second language acquisition and competence. Although clear differences between the two language groups were found with regard to their English proficiency in grade 5, these differences were not statistically significant. With regard to gender, clear differences were also found and most of these differences were statistically significant.

Die onlangs gepubliseerde Groot Woordeboek (Afrikaans en Nederlands), ook bekend as ANNA, is die eerste woordeboek met 'n geamalgameerde lemmalys gebaseer op die model van Martin en Gouws (2000). ANNA baan ook die weg vir 'n soortgelyke benadering vir ander nouverwante tale soos die Sothotale en die Ngunitale van Suid-Afrika. Die voor- en nadele van vyf aspekte te wete (a) vergelyking en kontras, (b) gebruikersvriendelikheid, (c) ruimtebesparing, (d) ordening van betekenisonderskeidings en (e) die aanbod van 'n afsonderlike grammatikale kompendium word krities beskou. Die beginsels waarop amalgamering berus, die tersaaklike lemmatipes, asook enkele kenmerke van die model word vooraf kortliks bespreek.Sleutelwoorde: geamalgameerde lemmalys, verwante tale, oortolligheid, Anna, tweetalige woordeboek, afrikaans, nederlands, inligtingskoste, Sisteemkoste

Syncretism is the phenomenon where one (phonological) form is able to spell out more than one (grammatical) function. The P(repositional) element van (“from/of”) in Afrikaans represents an instance of syncretism: it is able to spell out many different functions including spatial, possessive and partitive functions. Any theoretical framework seeking to account for how form relates to function ought to provide an account of this phenomenon. Within the broad minimalist approach, Nanosyntax (NS) has yielded the most systematic and explicit accounts of syncretism (cf. e.g. Starke 2009; Caha 2007, 2009). This paper offers a nanosyntactic characterisation of the Afrikaans P element van, focusing specifically on its behaviour in Afrikaans partitive constructions and offering a tentative analysis to account for the seemingly irregular behaviour displayed by van in these constructions. The analysis is based on a modified syntactic decomposition of “the genitive zone” proposed by Caha (2009). The presence of an additional node, Specific (SPF), is argued for in the lowest layer of the structure that is encoded on the lexical entry for van. One merit of the proposed analysis is that it takes into account how van interacts with other word-level elements in the phrase.Keywords: Partitive, Pseudo-partitive, Afrikaans, Syncretism, Nanosyntax

A theoretical account of specific language impairment (SLI) – one which places the locus of the impairment at Spell-Out at the syntax-phonology interface – is proposed and then tested against utterances from Afrikaans-speaking children with SLI. Drawing on Minimalism, our account offers a unified explanation for the seemingly diverse phenomena found in the Afrikaans data: omission of certain lexical material, double articulation of other lexical material and word order deviations. Based on our data, we conclude that the language problem of children with SLI appears to lie neither in the mapping from lexicon to syntax (thus in the selection of a lexical item as a member of the numeration) nor in the computational system, but in the mapping of an adult-like syntactic representation onto a proper sound representation.Keywords: Afrikaans; doubling; lexicon-syntax interface; SLI; syntax-PF interface

Portuguese creoles are divided between a Western and an Eastern area. The former includes all the languages spoken along and off the West African coast, as well as Spanish-relexified Papiamentu in the Caribbean. The Eastern area comprises Indo-Portuguese and its offshoots (Batavia Creole, Papiá Kristang, and Macaense).Both areas contrast on a number of features, in particular as far as the structure of possessive constructions is concerned. A typical Western instance of such a construction is Guinea-Bissau Kriyol kasa di Jon {house of J.} ‘John’s house’, (Kihm 1994), whereas a typical Eastern example is Korlai Teru su kadz {T. SU house} ‘Teru’s house’ (Clements 2007). The former construction is not represented in the East, except in Diu Indo-Portuguese (Cardoso 2013), whereas the latter is absent in the West, except in Papiamentu as an alternative to the {NP1 di NP2} construction.The contrast raises at least two questions: What is the proper morphosyntactic analysis of these constructions, especially the Eastern one? Why did the Eastern Portuguese creoles retain a construction that has no obvious source in the lexifier instead of keeping the original lexifier construction as the Western group did?The paper is organized according to these two questions. First I give a formal definition of the expression ‘possessive constructions’ and review how they are realized in creole languages generally. Then I focus on Portuguese creoles, describe possessive constructions in the two areas, and propose a morphosyntactic analysis. I then formulate an explanatory hypothesis for the East-West contrast, try to support it with linguistic and historical arguments, and examine possible counter-evidence. Finally I assess what such an explanation entails for how we conceive of creole emergence.

Certain language structures and skills continue to develop after the age of school entry. The present study sought to establish whether directly targeting the development of such complex language structures and skills in comprehension and production can be successful among older, school-going children. The data for the present study comprise four case studies of children with language learning problems, including language comprehension problems: one 5, one 6, and two 7 years of age. Relevant parts of the Receptive and Expressive Activities for Language Therapy (Southwood & Van Dulm, 2012) were used during six to eight language stimulation sessions. Substantial gains were seen when comparing pre- and post-stimulation language assessment results on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (Seymour, Roeper, & De Villiers, 2005). The implication is that direct targeting of specific later developing language structures and skills can render the desired results, well after their usual age of acquisition, even among children with language comprehension problems and within a limited number of sessions. Given the relationship between language skills and the development of reading skills, the findings have implications for the literacy development of Foundation Phase learners who enter school with underdeveloped language skills.

This article reports on the investigation of the acoustic characteristics of the Afrikaans voiceless alveolar fricative /s/[1]. As yet, a palatal [ʃ] for /s/ has been reported only in a limited case, namely where /s/ is followed by palatal /j/, for example in the phrase is jy (‘are you’), pronounced as [ə-ʃəi]. This seems to be an instance of regressive coarticulation, resulting in coalescence of basic /s/ and /j/. The present study revealed that, especially in the pronunciation of young, white Afrikaans-speakers, /s/ is also palatalised progressively when preceded by /r/ in the coda cluster /rs/, and, to a lesser extent, also in other contexts where /r/ is involved, for example across syllable and word boundaries. Only a slight presence of palatalisation was detected in the production of /s/ in the speech of the white, older speakers of the present study. This finding might be indicative of a definite change in the Afrikaans consonant system. A post hoc reflection is offered here on the possible presence of /s/-fronting, especially in the speech of the younger females. Such pronunciation could very well be a prestige marker for affluent speakers of Afrikaans.[1] Given that this is a study of the phonetic characteristics of the voiceless alveolar and palatal sibilant fricatives of Afrikaans, these two consonants as well as combinations thereof are presented with the phonetic symbols in square brackets [ ], except when they are specifically being dealt with in a phonemic sense, in which case the conventional slash symbols / / will be used. This is applicable to other characters too, such as the palatal fricative [j] in the next sentence. [Please click on "Supplementary files" in the ARTICLE TOOLS sidebar on the right for the accompanying video (Figure 3)]

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There is a great need for an instrument that can accurately identify children with language problems early, regardless of the language(s) they speak. Certain tasks have been identified as potential markers of language impairment, including sentence repetition and digit repetition (Ziethe, Eysholdt and Doellinger 2013: 1). The purpose of this study was to compare the sensitivity of these two potential markers in order to compile an accurate measuring instrument for language impairment in Afrikaans and South African English (SAE). The participants were 20 typically developing (TD) Afrikaans- and 20 TD SAE-speaking 5-year-olds, as well as five Afrikaans- and five SAE-speaking 5-year-olds with language impairment (LI). Sentence and digit repetition tasks were devised, recorded on CD, and performed by each participant individually. Both groups with LI performed poorly, and significantly more poorly than their corresponding TD group, on both repetition tasks. For both languages, (i) sentence repetition distinguished best between the participants with and without LI, and (ii) some items proved to be more sensitive than others for the difference between the performance of the TD and the LI groups. These items may be appropriate for inclusion in a screening tool for LI in 5-year-olds. The availability of language screening tools in several of South Africa’s languages can be of value to child language researchers and speech-language therapists. This study demonstrated that devising such tools could be a feasible endeavour. In contrast to diagnostic language assessment instruments, screening tools that employ repetition tasks can be devised relatively quickly and economically, and can contribute to the early identification of children with language problems in the interim, while diagnostic instruments are developed.Keywords: sentence repetition, digit repetition, language impairment, Afrikaans, South African English

This paper tries to construct a bridge between the concerns of theoretical linguistics and those of multilingualism and code-switching (CS) research. It argues that the primary special point of interaction between these fields lies in the question of potential equivalence between elements or categories, bridging across languages. After giving an overview of some major findings in recent CS research, these findings are interpreted in a constraint- or strategy-based framework. Then I explore the notion of categorical equivalence, starting with the observation that the insertion of single functional categories is highly restricted in CS contexts. Subsequently a number of concrete questions are formulated for research in this domain based on available data for Afrikaans-English and isiXhosa- English CS.Keywords: code-switching, categorical equivalence, functional categories, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, English

Motion events occur frequently in everyday life as people and objects constantly change their relative location to one another. Although children's descriptions of motion events resemble those of adults in their own language group from very early on (Choi and Bowermann 1991), there is increasing evidence for subtle differences as well. Young children speaking different languages seem to have some difficulty in expressing two types of spatial information in the same conceptual frame (e.g. Ochsenbauer and Hickmann 2010). In English and other satellite-framed languages such as German and Afrikaans, this task involves using a complex particle verb construction in which a directional particle (e.g. out) combines with a prepositional phrase carrying further information about the source or goal of movement (e.g. some bees came out of the tree) (Berman and Slobin 1994:161). Little is known about the development of this type of structure in satellite-framed languages such as Afrikaans. This paper examined whether (i) there are developmental differences between adults and 6-year-old Afrikaans-speaking children in the production of preposition+verb particle structures, and whether (ii) children with language impairment produce these structures in a different way than typically developing children. Target elements were preposition+verb particle structures with the particles af 'down', in 'in', uit 'out' and op 'up'. The performance of ten adults was compared to that of 30 typically developing and three language-impaired 6-year-olds. Half of the participants in the adult and typically developing groups were speakers of Mainstream Afrikaans (MA), and half were speakers of Cape Afrikaans (CA), a non-mainstream dialect. Distinct developmental differences that could not be attributed to dialectal variation, were found between 6-year-olds and adults. Children with language impairment showed less variation in their responses than their typically developing peers. Possible explanations for the findings are discussed.Keywords: Afrikaans, Cape Afrikaans, Spatial Language, Dialectal Variation, Language Disorder

Discourse markers (DMs) are words or phrases speakers employ to coordinate what they want to say when, to whom and how during conversation. The purpose of this study was to establish (i) what types of DMs occur in the language of young Afrikaans-speaking children; (ii) what development, if any, takes place in DM use from the age of 4 years to 6 years; and (iii) how, if at all, the use of DMs by children with specific language impairment (SLI) differs from that of typically develping (TD) children. The participants were three Afrikaans-speaking groups: 15 TD 6-year-olds, 15 6-year-olds with SLI, and 15 TD 4-year-olds matched on mean length of utterance with the SLI group. A 30- minute spontaneous language sample was obtained from each participant. The number of occurrences of DMs (tokens) and the number of different DMs (types) used during these 30 minutes were tallied for each participant individually and for each of the three groups. It was found that maar 'but', en 'and', ja 'yes', and dan 'then' were some of the most frequently occurring DMs in the three groups. The SLI group used DMs that also occurred in the language of the TD groups, but the SLI group also used DMs which were not used by the TD groups at all. In terms of number of different DMs used, the SLI group functioned at a level between the two TD groups: They used more and a wider range of markers than the 4-year-olds but fewer and a smaller range of markers than their 6-year-old peers. It appears then that the use of DMs shows development between the ages of 4 and 6 years and that the use of DMs is delayed in children with SLI. Appropriate use of DMs can improve listeners' understanding of what is said; as such, it is recommended that speech-language therapists make DMs a focus point during therapy delivery to children with language impairment.Keywords: Specific Language Impairment, Afrikaans, Discourse Markers, Child Language Development

Two construction types that are allowed in Afrikaans but not in French are transitive expletive constructions and full-NP object shift constructions. The study reported here tested whether Afrikaansspeaking advanced adult learners had knowledge of the ungrammaticality of these two construction types in the target L2 French, given that they had not been instructed about this ungrammaticality. The results of this study show that a large number of the L2 learners had indeed acquired knowledge of this ungrammaticality, despite the absence of (explicit) negative evidence to this effect, raising the question of which types of input or evidence learners make use of in L2 acquisition.Keywords: Adult L2 Acquisition, Afrikaans, French, Different Types of Input, Unlearning Construction Types

Automatic lemmatisation for Afrikaans Automatic lemmatisation is a general normalisation procedure in text processing, where all inflected forms of a lexical word are normalised to a single lemma (i.e. a meaningful, uninflected base form from which more complex word forms could be formed). Traditionally, lemmatisers are developed by writing language-specific rules to identify lemmas. In this article an alternative approach is investigated, namely a machine learning approach, to develop a lemmatiser for Afrikaans (LIA: “Lemmaidentifiseerder vir Afrikaans”). An overview regarding the process of inflection in Afrikaans is provided with the aim of identifying the categories of inflection that are relevant for lemmatisation in Afrikaans. The format of the input and output is described with special reference to the nine inflectional categories for Afrikaans that the system should be able to handle. Then the task of lemmatisation as a classification task for machine learning is described, and a concise introduction to memory-based learning is provided. The development and evaluation of LIA is discussed in detail, and it is illustrated how the performance of the initial classifier is improved through feature selection and parameter optimisation. The best classifier reaches an accuracy of 92,8%. The article concludes with a view on some future work.

This article has three major objectives. Firstly, it aims to describe and account for the peculiarity of the modern Afrikaans negative concord marker nie2 in the familiar Western European context. I appeal to Roberge’s (2000) diachronic proposals as the initial starting point for this oddness, showing how nie2’s putative origins as a discourse-oriented particle are synchronically reflected in the modern language, producing, among other things, what appears to be inertness in the context of Jespersen’s Cycle. This inertness leads to the interface-driven hypothesis that systems in which a structurally very high element becomes grammaticalised as a sentential Negative Concord element will not progress to the next stage of Jespersen’s Cycle, i.e. a structurally very high Negative Concord element will never take over as the “real” negation element. The article’s second objective is to demonstrate, on the basis of data from Brazilian Portuguese, Santomé, and a subset of Bantu languages, that the predictions of this hypothesis appear to be correct. At the same time, I show how crucial it is to distinguish the cyclic negation-reinforcing developments associated with Jespersen’s Cycle from non-cyclic reinforcement developments; as they may draw on the same lexical resources, this can be a challenging task, particularly where less well-studied languages are the object of investigation. The final part of the article broadens the focus, considering Afrikaans’s overall negation profile in the context of negation typology and learnability. The conclusion drawn here is that this system, which owes some of its properties to prescriptive stipulations, is a highly unusual and possibly not even naturally acquirable one.Keywords: Afrikaans, Jespersen’s Cycle, learnability, negation, Negative Concord, typology

This article provides a non-formalistic description of the various reflexive pronouns in Afrikaans. In addition to the traditional class of reflexive pronouns, it is shown that possessive pronouns can also be used reflexively. The facts about (obligatory) reflexivity involving these two types of pronoun are illustrated with reference to several types of construction in which they can occur. It is moreover shown that, besides the subject, the reflexive can take as its antecedent an expression functioning as the direct object, indirect object or as a prepositional object. Attention is also given to a number of non-reflexive constructions, that is, constructions containing inherently non-reflexive verbs and prepositions which disallow a coreferential relationship between the pronoun and some other expression in the sentence.

In this paper we present a case study of interethnic relations through language variation involving two population groups supposedly belonging to one single speech community, namely the White and Coloured Afrikaans speakers of Namibia. The specific question that we wish to tackle in reference to that community is the extent to which Coloured and White identities are differentiable via linguistic means and how those identities are negotiated in intergroup settings where Coloured and White Afrikaans speakers are in mutual contact. The methodology used to answer this question is largely based on Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), which entails the characterization of intergroup language variation in terms of convergence, divergence and maintenance, as well as the characterization of speakers’ group identities in terms of ‘subordinate’ and ‘superordinate’ identities.Keywords: Afrikaans; code-switching; identity; Coloureds; Namibia

In the literature on negation, Afrikaans is generally categorised as a negative concord language. Unlike most other negative concord languages though, utterances containing multiple indefinites in the scope of negation are typically produced with a combination of one negative indefinite and one (or more) non-negative indefinite, or negative polarity item, as in (i).(i) Ons het niemand ooit daar gesien nie.we have nobody ever there PST-see SN‘We never saw anybody there.’However, although prohibited in formal, standard Afrikaans, where such utterances are prescriptively assigned a double negation meaning (¬∃x1¬∃x2) and produced with a specific prosodic contour, in colloquial Afrikaans it is also possible to produce multiple negative indefinites with a single, or negative concord, meaning, as in (ii).(ii) Ons het niemand nooit daar gesien nie.we have nobody ever there PST-see SN‘We never saw anybody there.’ (¬∃x1∃x2)Standard analyses of negative concord as presented in the literature do not account for the alternation of indefinites and negative indefinites in (i) vs. (ii), or the potential availability of both negative concord and double negation readings for the utterance in (ii). Perception experiments show that grammaticality judgements, by native speakers of Afrikaans, of multiple negative indefinites presented as auditory stimuli exhibit gradient acceptability in relation to combinations of negative indefinites and non-negative indefinites. Furthermore, this experimental data indicates that listeners use sentence prosody to assist in the interpretation of potentially ambiguous sentences containing multiple negative indefinites. The gradience of acceptability of multiple negative indefinite combinations is mirrored in turn by the frequency of such constructions in a written corpus of Afrikaans. In this paper, we account for this variation in the expression and interpretation of multiple indefinites in the scope of negation within the framework of stratified bidirectional Optimality Theory (OT). Such an analysis fills a gap in the typology of negation in accounting for alternation between negative and nonnegative indefinites in the production of standard and colloquial Afrikaans, as observed through corpus and experimental data, and allows for a prosodically constrained ambiguity between single and double negation readings.Keywords: Negation, Negative Indefinites, Afrikaans, Optimality Theory, Syntax-Semantics Interface

This paper explores the textual-linguistic norms evident in the translation of culturally specific material in a sample of translated South African children's books in Afrikaans and English, with a view to investigating the tensions between domestication and foreignisation, particularly as related to different types of books, such as primers, local picture books, and international picture books. A detailed qualitative textual analysis of micro-level translation choices relating to cultural orientation is presented, comparing the 21 translations in the sample with their source texts, and comparing subsamples of different types of books with one another. The analysis suggests the prevalence of hybrid translation strategies that orient translated texts in multiple cultural directions, but also indicates potentially significant differences in this regard between different types of books, with translations of international picture books tending towards greater use of domesticating strategies, despite their generally culturally generic background. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2011.608850 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0907676X.2011.608850

The first significant appearance of Cape Dutch/Afrikaans as a literary medium has been situated in the satirical dialogues published in the journalist Meurants Cradocksch Nieuwsblad from 1860 onwards. In the context of the White and Christian-dominated Afrikaans language movements, and afterwards of Apartheid, little attention has been paid to the evidence of an older Cape Dutch/Afrikaans literary tradition cultivated among Muslim Cape Coloureds, often referred to as Cape Malays. Descending mainly from the Asian slaves brought by the VOC, the Cape Malays have from an early stage developed a distinct religious culture through their cultivation of Islam, as well as a distinct linguistic identity through their connexions with the Dutch East Indies and the Islamic world. Those cultural idiosyncrasies resulted in a relatively late nativization of Cape Dutch as well as the appearance in the early 19th century of a local Muslim literature, using as a linguistic medium a distinct religious variety of Cape Dutch/Afrikaans. That variety was among other things known as Kitaab-Hollandsch, a term which stressed its vernacular identity, as well as its literary and religious character. Reflecting its specificity, that variety was initially using only the Arabic alphabet until knowledge of the Roman alphabet started to spread among the Cape Malay intelligentsia in the late part of the 19th century. The use of that variety, in both its Arabic and Roman forms, seems to have endured up until the mid 20th century. Due to the particular socio-cultural settings in which it evolved, Kitaab-Hollandsch/Afrikaans can offer an interesting outlook on the process of standardization of the non-White varieties of Cape Dutch/Afrikaans. In the absence of a thorough diachronic survey, we have compiled a range of Cape Malay Afrikaans religious texts covering roughly one century from the mid 19th up to the mid 20th century, i.e. that period which saw the gradual transition from Dutch to Afrikaans as official norm. This article presents the socio-historical and linguistic context of Muslim Cape Dutch/Afrikaans literature using the same text as in a previous article (Stell et al. 2007). It then focuses on the areas of greatest diachronic variation in the phonology, lexicon, idiomaticity, morphology and syntax of our Cape Malay texts. It then attempts to place that variation within the perspective of the evolution of Cape Dutch/Afrikaans.

In generative linguistics, many researchers agree that (something like) Universal Grammar (UG) must play some role in second language (L2) acquisition, since the logical problem of first language (L1) acquisition1 seems to hold for L2 acquisition, as well: in L2 acquisition, as in L1 acquisition, the complex, abstract system of knowledge that the learner ends up acquiring exceeds to a great extent the primary linguistic data that the learner receives as input (see White 1989 for more detailed arguments). However, these researchers are still debating the following two questions as to the exact role of UG in L2 acquisition: (i) what constitutes the initial state of L2 acquisition? and (ii) is parameter resetting possible in situations in which the value of a certain parameter differs for the learner's L1 and the target L2? A number of hypotheses have been proposed in response to either one or both of these questions (see, for example, Clahsen and Muysken 1986, 1989; Epstein, Flynn and Martohardjono 1996; Eubank 1993/1994, 1994, 1996; Hawkins and Chan 1997; Vainikka and Young-Scholten 1994, 1996; also White 2003 for an overview). One such hypothesis is the Full Transfer Full Access hypothesis (FTFA) (e.g. Schwartz and Sprouse 1994, 1996; White 1989, 2003) which proposes the following answers to the above questions: (i) the learner's L1 grammar (including L1 parameter settings) constitutes the initial state of L2 acquisition (= full transfer), and (ii) the L2 learner has access to UG in its entirety and, hence, parameter resetting is possible in L2 acquisition (= full access).

In 2011 the Groot Woordenboek Afrikaans en Nederlands (Large Dictionary Afrikaans and Dutch), commonly known as ANNA, appeared. Contrary to so-called difference dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries of narrowly related languages which describe only differences between the two languages, ANNA describes both differences and similarities between Afrikaans and Dutch, not only on the semantic level but on the combinatorial and pragmatic level as well. In this sense ANNA is a unique project, based on an original amalgamation model. In this article first some background information will be given about the ANNA project and its results, followed by a presentation of the underlying model and an evaluation of it. Keywords:Amalgamated Dictionary, Bilingual Dictionary, Amalgamation Model, Afrikaans, Dutch, Anna, Cognates, False Friends, Contrastive Dictionary, Reading Dictionary, Translation Dictionary