Once a Boertjie, always a Boertjie? a poststructuralist study of written English-Afrikaans code-switching.
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Date
2013-08-19
Authors
Kotze, Leonie
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Abstract
This study analyses the social meanings of Afrikaans in post-apartheid South Africa by
examining the use of Afrikaans in social phenomena such as ethnicity, race, class and politics
in written English-Afrikaans code-switching in the Sunday Times during the period January
to June 2009. This study arose as a consequence of the observation that the continued use of
Afrikaans in an English-medium newspaper, sixteen years after the first South African
democratic elections, might be somewhat unusual, particularly given that Afrikaans was the
main vehicle through which Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid were established and
maintained. Although Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid as a state ideology fell away after
the 1994 South African democratic elections, Afrikaans is generally perceived as a marker of
apartheid and oppression. The continued use of Afrikaans is also somewhat surprising given
that English has always carried more prestige than Afrikaans. Against this backdrop, the
study draws upon Irvine and Gal’s notions of indexicality, iconization, fractal recursivity and
erasure to illustrate that Afrikaans has been employed mainly to highlight and criticise
negative social and political aspects in South African society such as unacceptable behaviour
by politicians or losing a cricket/rugby/football match. The study also illustrates that
Afrikaans is associated mainly with the ethnic group ‘Afrikaners’, which in turn is associated
with ‘backwardness’, ‘whiteness’, ‘rurality,’ ‘racism’, ‘apartheid’ and ‘aggression’.
Furthermore, the study shows the relevance of the sociopolitical and sociolinguistic history of
South Africa for the various associations of the current use of Afrikaans in English-language
media.