Afrikaans in contact with English: endangered language or case of exceptional bilingualism?

Abstract

At present, discussions about potential language shift from African languages or Afrikaans to English are widespread in South Africa. This article focuses on the position of Afrikaans. Researchers interested in the position of Afrikaans today hold different views and there are some methodological prob lems with current studies. The main aim of this article is to problematize claims of language shift among Afrikaans speakers by analyzing relevant data from a larger scale survey of the language repertoires of an identified Afrikaans popula tion (n = 244) in the Vaal Triangle region. The research method involved the adap tation of language history or experience questionnaires designed by bilingualism researchers to describe the language repertoires of a large population of multi lingual students. The main findings of the study are that: (a) AfrikaansEnglish bilingualism (and biliteracy) is prominent among the Afrikaans participants in the study; (b) the position of English as an important language in the bilingual repertoires of the participants is confirmed; and (c) Afrikaans seems firmly set as the language that contributes most to the identity of these participants. A pattern of stable bilingualism and biliteracy emerges. The value of adding larger scale quantitative studies to complement smaller, qualitative studies in discussions of language shift and maintenance is confirmed by this study. The impact of the omission of AfrikaansEnglish bilingualism in the debate about Afrikaans is discussed.

Being English in multilingual South Africa

“…The open question at the end of the survey is analysed with Atlas.ti version 8. The analysis of the language repertoire survey data for participants of African home languages (Coetzee‐Van Rooy, 2012; 2014; 2016) and Afrikaans (Coetzee‐Van Rooy, 2013) as a home language were published elsewhere. The focus of this article is on the analysis of the language repertoires of the English home language participants that formed part of the longitudinal language repertoire study and that were not reported previously.…”

Conceptual vocabulary in Grade 2 isiZulu-English and Grade 1 Afrikaans-English bilinguals

“…In addition, a fairly standard variety of Afrikaans is spoken in Gauteng. Afrikaans was chosen as the other primary home language because although many Afrikaans children attend English schools, the acquisition of Afrikaans is generally well supported in language-rich home environments and exposure to Afrikaans teaching in the school context, potentially resulting in more balanced bilingualism (Coetzee-Van Rooy 2013).…”

Researching South African Englishes

“…English is increasingly being viewed in very favorable terms, attitudinally. However, as Coetzee‐Van Rooy (2012, 2013) has shown, this does not mean that monolingualism is a possibility in the foreseeable future, nor that attitudes towards the other languages are increasingly negative. English is one language that functions with others in sets, and other languages may be more important to the identity constructions of many (‘non‐native’ English‐speaking) South Africans than English itself.…”