The Influence of English on Afrikaans

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Chapter Seven

7.0 The corpus

I make no claim to presenting a complete collection of English structures in Afrikaans. That would be an impossible task as the list is infinite and is being added to all the time. However, I do feel that the categories of influence under which I have classed my examples present a reasonably complete picture of the full range of the sorts of influence that English has had on Afrikaans to date. I invite others to correct me here if I have overlooked any categories or if they feel that further subcategories can be identified. Some readers may disagree with the terminology I have used - a traditional one to facilitate access by laymen to my corpus - but hopefully all will agree with the underlying interference being described.

Occasionally examples occur more than once, although I have tried to avoid this because of the size of the corpus, but it could not always be avoided where certain structures illustrate more than one English feature or where they belong as much in one section as in another - all classification of this sort is to a degree artificial and arbitrary.

I have borrowed very few examples from the many works on anglicisms. Many of the examples to be found in older literature on the topic are presumably no longer current, but I am not in a position to arbitrate on what is or is not still current, plus the fact that it is superfluous to reproduce lists of anglicisms given in other works that can be referred to anyway by the reader. What is more, I have applied my own taxonomy which bears little resemblance to that employed by my predecessors. This corpus is based almost entirely on my own observations which has resulted, I believe, in the inclusion of many examples which have not attracted the attention of previous authors on the topic. Occasionally I refer to recent, authoritative works that shed a little more light on a given issue.

I have refrained from applying the label ingeburger to my examples and on the whole from distinguishing structures found only in the spoken language from those that are also tolerated in the written language - actually just another way of saying that they are ingeburger or not. It is easy enough to make errors of judgement about whether a given structure is an anglicism or not; deciding in turn whether that structure is considered acceptable in speech only and/or in writing too, opens the way for even more controversy. I have chosen this course of action not only because I, as a non-native-speaker, am not always in a position to draw such lines, but

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because to act otherwise usually entails a value judgement, something I wish to make a point of avoiding - I do not aim to purify the language, but merely to describe it. I am sure that no two Afrikaners would agree on the acceptability or otherwise of many of the examples in this corpus, but I do believe that my examples all occur fairly frequently, at least in the spoken language. Many of the structures will be considered correct Afrikaans by all native-speakers with other Diets options now sounding unusual, archaic or even incorrect. On the other hand, many will feel on reading some of my examples that they would never use such structures in their Afrikaans - the question the Afrikaans reader should ask himself is not whether he would use it himself, but has he heard it used.

Where I contrast an Afrikaans construction with a Dutch one, I do not thereby intend to imply that therefore that Diets structure should also be considered correct Afrikaans or even necessarily that the Afrikaans structure in question is therefore an anglicism, but merely that that possibility/probability exists. Sometimes the Dutch alternative given in brackets would even be considered wrong in Afrikaans. I mention it merely for comparison and thus to highlight where Afrikaans and English coincide and Afrikaans and Dutch differ.

In many sections I have included English translations of the Afrikaans examples for two reasons: 1) to make it perfectly clear of which English structure I feel the Afrikaans one under discussion is an imitation, as otherwise the examples may be somewhat cryptic, and 2) to make the content of this chapter more comprehensible to non-South African readers. (cf. 1.2.3 for the importance of the topic to the world at large)