September is Heritage Month and South African languages, official and unofficial, are part of that heritage. In the work below, I write about languages as part of South African heritage, history and culture, and argue that they share some common words.
This is, among many factors, a result of the long history of co-existence because of which, according to my observations, it is common in South Africa to find a number of words with similar meaning and sound being used in several languages. That linguistic phenomenon is known as cross-language word usage which happens because of language interaction.
In Africa, cross-language interaction took place when European languages came into contact with African languages before and during the period of missionaries, at the times of intercontinental trade such as the Indian-Dutch interaction, and later in a massive scale during the colonisation period. To my knowledge, in language contact the languages that meet always have unequal relations. One language often dominates the other as was the case with colonial languages that became dominant in the colonised countries. In Europe, for example, when France occupied England, French became the official and dominant language, then Old French kitchen words such as pork, mutton and beef, meaning, flesh of a pig, flesh of a sheep, and flesh of a cow respectively, became entrenched in Middle English and have become natural words in modern English.
What could be observed above with the example of French and English is that colonial languages dominated local languages in the sense that the master languages were used as sole official languages, and dominated in all important and official domains. It is worth remembering that in South Africa, Dutch – and later Afrikaans – was the official language of the Cape during Jan van Riebeeck’s time. Thereafter, English and Afrikaans became the only official languages of South Africa until democracy in 1994 when all homeland languages joined them, bringing it to 11 official languages of the Republic of South Africa.
The process of cross-language word usage I observed in African languages in South Africa, is that they have a long history of existing together in the southern region of Africa with the migration of users northward from the Great Lakes. As a result of this long co-existence, there has been borrowing and interchange of words with the same spelling and meaning in different languages, such as the word, mona, for jealousy, in Nguni and Sotho language groups. Some cognate words are more common in languages’ affinities, such as within the sister languages of the Nguni group (isiZulu, isiXhosa, isiSwati and isiNdebele) including the following cognates:
muntu – person
ndoda – man
mama – mother
nkomo – cow
Sotho language groups have too many common words among them, for example, the following words:
banna – men
basadi – women
bana – children
pula – rain
The high percentage of common word usage within each language group, simplifies communication among them.
Also, there have been loan words from European languages, and I have divided them according to domains such as kitchen, ox wagon and school:
English-isiZulu kitchen words:
porridge –phalish
spoon – sipuni
dish – ndishi
pot – bhodo/bhodwe
bottle – bhodlela
These words are used for items that arrived with European missionaries during the first language encounter with Africans. The isiZulu word for spoon is khezo, but that meaning is far less used by the generation born after 1994. To them, sipuni is the original word for spoon. The Afrikaans word pap is used as papa in Nguni and Sotho language groups, but isiZulu sometimes uses phalishi for porridge but that meaning has shifted to soft porridge. Also, the English and Afrikaans words cat and kat, are naturalised in Nguni and Sotho language groups as kati and katse, respectively. In isiZulu cat is mangobe, and in Sesotho is mosiya.
I suspect in the next generation, the origin of a loan word will be known to only a few people, for example in Sesotho, where missionaries were from France, the Sesotho word for sweets, dipongpong (singular: pongpong), is no longer recognised as the French loan word, bonbon.
Afrikaans-isiZulu “ox wagon words”
The words below became common in isiZulu language usage because of the interaction of AmaZulu and the Afrikaans-speaking Voortrekkers. The language used by the Voortrekkers as masters and AmaZulu as servants, was the “ox wagon language” because the ox wagons were used as the means of transport by the Voortrekkers. Here are ox wagon language words naturalised in the isiZulu language:
jong oss – jongosi
joke – joko
trap – talabha
span – sipani
The original meanings of some of the words above have been expanded in the recipient language, for example, in isiZulu, jongosi’s meaning frequently refers to a strong young man, and that isiZulu meaning is closer to the Afrikaans one for jong (not with, oss), which the Afrikaans dictionary explains as: a young Afrikaans man, a boyfriend or lover, kêrel.
Consequently, for the young isiZulu-speaking generation, the meaning of young ox, is almost lost. Further, talabha was used in the original sense when wild oxen were trained to pull a wagon or sledge. Its current meaning refers to hitting someone with a stick. Furthermore, sipani’s meaning as a group of oxen pulling together, is being replaced by a common meaning of a sports team, especially a soccer team.
English-isiZulu school words
The words below were introduced by Western education many years ago before colonisation took place. To my knowledge, they are still identifiable as words from the English and Afrikaans languages:
teacher – thisha
book/boek – bhuku (English/Afrikaans)
pen – peni (English/Afrikaans)
school/skool – sikole (English/Afrikaans)
The loan words above are common in all South African indigenous languages and beyond. Consequently, the cross-word usage in education is largely a process of adaptation. For example, the subject areas are Africanised when the conversation is in African languages: Biology, Psychology, Economics and Geography. This adaptation is what the Middle English language did through the languages of education at the time, which were Greek and Latin.
Loan words did not only become a feature of introducing English and Afrikaans words into African languages, but the reverse also took place. A glance through a dictionary of South African English reveals the extent to which it has recognised African language words as English. Some Zulu language words are now recognised by the English Oxford Dictionary as the result of the Anglo-Zulu War which culminated in Isandlwana, where the Zulu people defeated the English army. The most recent loan word to be accommodated into the English language, is vuvuzela, the instrument that was popularised during the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa.
Additionally, because languages are spoken across borders. I often hear words of Afrikaans origin in Botswana and Mozambique, for example, in the city of Maputo, I frequently hear the following phrase in Sishangana, which contains an Afrikaans word, kwaad: bayakwata (they become angry). This feature is the result of another mass northward movement, beyond the Limpopo River, of the Nguni people during and after King Shaka’s Mfecane. Another trek was by Cecil Rhodes to the Matopos of Zimbabwe where his followers and workers, left a legacy of isiXhosa language that now co-exists with languages of that place, and language borrowing has taken place among those languages.
In addition to the across borders language borrowing, there has, since 1994, been some acceptable inter-language word usage between what was marginalised as “Boesman Afrikaans” or “Hotnot Afrikaans” and “pront Afrikaans” (pront: prompt). The word lekke, has gained a broader meaning than lekker, as in lokal is lekke.
Similarly, I noted that in the Boland, “Boesman Afrikaans” words and syntax are becoming acceptable in pront Afrikaans, for example, the word eke, for ek, as in the sentence: eke, ek is a man, eke (Me, I am a (real) man.
My understanding is that though Indian words may be frequently used by English-speaking Indians of South Africa, they seem less influential outside that community, yet the word biryani has become very common in the isiZulu-speaking communities that serve that Indian food.
New words
New loan words arrived with new inventions in technology and are Africanised into the word structure of various African languages. The noun phone is Africanised in all African languages of South Africa as verb and noun, for example, it is used as a verb in the following languages:
Ngizofona in isiZulu.
Ke tla founa in Sesotho.
Ndizofona in isiXhosa.
There a similar pattern with current technology terminology: television, computer, delete, click, save and inbox, among others.
In conclusion, I believe that because of the long history of co-existence among the languages of South Africa, a healthy interaction of words in South Africa’s languages exists.
Professor Nogwaja Zulu is a lecturer at the African Languages Discipline in UKZN’s School of Arts.
*The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
