Attempts to carve language for ‘true Afrikaners’ scoffed at

EARLY steps to formalise Africa’s youngest indigenous language were the subject of illjudged ridicule in the second week of September 1877.

Afrikaans had and was, in no small part, a token of resistance to the white man’s world.

But the meeting of “Die Genootskap van Regte Afrikanders” in 1877, and its intentions to fashion a written form of Afrikaans, had chauvinists in a froth.

The following is an edited version of a contemporary report. September 13, 1877 “Die taal van ons nasie” An attempt is being made by a number of jokers near Cape Town to reduce the “Plat Hollands” of the streets and the kitchen to a written language and to perpetuate it. They are carrying on the joke well. They have a newspaper, have published a history of the colony, an almanac and, to crown the joke – a grammar. It is impossible to read those productions without laughing, because one cannot help feeling while reading that the writers are themselves laughing while they write. The spelling, the words, the idioms, the grammar – all is such as may at any time be taken phonetically from the mouth of any old Hottentots.

There is an evident effort on the part of the writers to say what they have to say with all the dry sly humour of that gentlemen, especially if he is “een bietje gedrink”. The promoters of the Patriot movement are laughed at and ridiculed by their sensible countrymen, but they stick to their joke.

The headquarters of these jokers is the Paarl, which does not say much for the influence of the capital in preserving and extending the Dutch language. This society, “Die Genootskap van Regte Afrikanders”, has just held its second annual meeting in the place. The president… read his annual report. If we fancy the annual report of an English literary society drawn up in the Lancashire dialect we have some idea what relation the language of this document bears to the language of Holland.

It begins thus, “Ons Genootskap is van dag twee jaar oud. Die verslag wat ons nou ver die Lede Voorleg zal, als dit goedgekeur word, gedruk en gelees worde deur die heele land. Deur vrind en vyand. En die bestuur denk dat dit tyd is om ‘n bietje meer van ons toestand en ons werk an die lig te lat kom.”

This is scandalous, and worthy of men who because they see no possibility of maintaining, or rather, of restoring among the mass of the old Colonists the language of Holland, would keep out English by trying to make the lingo and slang of the lowest Hottentots the language of these people.