Is there a Namibian Afrikaans? Recent trends in grammatical variation in Afrikaans varieties within and across Namibia's borders

Abstract

There has been a tradition of treating geographical factors and social structures as distinct variables in research on language variation within single speech communities, and as a result their mode of interaction has not yet been theorized (Britain 2002). At which point geography, in its human and physical dimensions, precedes or follows social structures in the configuration of language variation seems to depend on two potentially related factors, i.e. the strength or weakness of social network ties, as well as the propensity of a given society to maintain ethnic divides. Of interest here is how far a recent political border can geographically disrupt formerly homogeneous patterns of language variation within a single, yet ethnically divided speech community, and, conversely, how far a range of social factors co-defined by ethnicity can ensure the maintenance of linguistic homogeneity irrespective of new political configurations of space.Variation in has rarely been characterized in terms of the political border separating Namibia (formerly South West Africa or S.W.A.) and South Africa ever since Independence in 1990. Instead, the varieties spoken in S.W.A./Namibia have pretty much been regarded as a constellation of relocated South African varieties. It seems fair to assume that, up until Independence, these varieties had little sociolinguistic scope for diverging from their South African counterparts and that a state of continuum prevailed on account of greater freedom of movement across the border as well as similar degrees of exposure to prescriptive Standard through education.The main question we want to answer here is how much potential for disruption of that continuum, if it prevailed at all, has been brought about by Namibia's political border and its sociolinguistic implications, and whether that potential warrants the use of the label Namibian Afrikaans in reference to the varieties spoken in Namibia.