Variasies in die verskrifteliking van Kaapse Afrikaans: ’n sosiolinguistiese ondersoek
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Date
2024
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University of the Western Cape
Abstract
Variation linguistics refers to a discipline in linguistics that approaches variation, as reflected in language varieties and language variants, from a dialectological as well as a sociolinguistic point of view. Two examples of the Afrikaans varieties are Standard Afrikaans and Colloquial Afrikaans. The former variety was initially considered as the only acceptable form for written Afrikaans; while the latter was mainly known as a spoken variety. This view began to change when Adam Small began to introduce Kaaps (as a form of Colloquial Afrikaans) as a written language. Cape Afrikaans (also known as Cape Vernacular Afrikaans or Kaaps) is nevertheless still seen today by some speakers of Standard Afrikaans as an inferior language form, i.e. a deviation of Standard Afrikaans. Kaaps historically reaches back to the influence of slaves on the formation of Afrikaans in the seventeenth century. Therefore, Kaaps is considered as one of the oldest varieties of Afrikaans which has been spoken in the Cape since the 17th century and today is still the language of many coloured working class in the Cape Peninsula and surrounding areas (such as the Boland, Noord Boland, the Overberg and the Little Karoo). Because of the strong associations Kaaps has with coloured people and their level of literacy (Willemse, 2012), this variety is considered by Dyers (2015:57) as one of the most stigmatised varieties of Afrikaans. The motivation for this study is that the scriptification of Cape Vernacular Afrikaans has so far received little attention in formal research. During my honors studies, I became aware that a writing system that accommodates Colloquial Afrikaans has not yet been designed. The question guiding this study is: what variations are there in the writing style of Kaaps and how does this affect the design of a writing system for Kaaps? Is the spelling of a standard variant such as the word “jy” djy or dzy? Is one (way of writing) correct and the other incorrect? Or is one a variant form of the other? This is the core of this investigation. There has not been a study done before on the prescriptiveness of Kaaps, so it is essential that this type of research is done. There is not just one representation of language, but the Afrikaans language consists of two representations, namely a written and spoken form. The fact that there is to date no Afrikaans writing system that accommodates spoken Afrikaans, contributes to the motivation for this study. So, the focus in this study is the codification of Kaaps. There are no set language rules and norms laid down for the non-standard spelling forms of Afrikaans. In fact, although there are items from Kaaps and Orange River Afrikaans included in the AWS, these colloquial varieties of Afrikaans do not receive enough recognition.
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Keywords
Allegro Speech Forms, Dialect Respellings, Cape Afrikaans, Codification, Non-Standard Variety