ABSTRACT
It is not traditional to talk of the existence of dialects of Afrikaans, and yet certain regional variants do exist, as is to be expected over such distances in a language that has been evolving since the middle of the seventeenth century. Generally speaking three broad regional varieties are recognized (Figure 15.1): (a) the Western Cape, represented in its most extreme form by the highly distinctive speech of many so-called Cape coloureds (i.e. people of mixed race in the South African context) in that region; (b) the Eastern Cape together with the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, settlement of the latter two regions having taken place from the Eastern Cape Province; (c) Orange River Afrikaans, a term applied to a highly distinctive variant of the language that developed among the Griqua population (a subdivision of the coloureds whose ancestors were local Khoi (i.e. Hottentots) and white precursors of the later voortrekkers). The Griquas live(d) along the Orange River in the northern Cape and southern Free State. A group of these people trekked into South West Africa (now Namibia) in the 1860s and established Afrikaans there as an indigenous non-white language. Their present descendents in Namibia are the Rehoboth Basters. As far as the standard language is concerned, the variant of the former Boer Republics rules supreme, without any negative connotatons being applied to other variants, except where those variants, as is commonly the case, go hand in hand with ethnic differences. The quite deviant variety of Afrikaans spoken by many coloureds, for
Figure 15.1 Map of South Africa
BOSTWANA
WESTERN CAPE
• Windhoek
NAMIBIA
CapeTown
example, and sometimes referred to as 'advanced Afrikaans' in linguistic circles (implying that it is the product of pidginization), is one such 'dialect' that is looked down upon, even by many coloureds.
