“…Nienaber, 1994;van Rensburg, 2016) when a first permanent Dutch settlement was established in the Cape. The emergence and development of Afrikaans out of Dutch has been the object of much debate, with hypotheses ranging from postulations of a purely internal, if accelerated development of dislocated Dutch, to analyses in terms of deep creolisation and adstrate influence from Khoesan languages, South-African Malay, Bantu languages, and Portuguese Creole, and various positions in between (see Roberge, 2002; van Sluijs, 2013 for overviews). Our concern, though, is not the history of the observable linguistic features of Afrikaans, but the competing metadiscourses sanctioning it, or not, as a separate linguistic category and as a standard language fit for governance, written administration, and 'high culture'.…”