Resumen de Afrikaans in contact with English: endangered language or case of exceptional bilingualism?
At present, discussions about potential language shift from African languages or Afrikaans to English are widespread in South Africa. This article focuses on the position of Afrikaans. Researchers interested in the position of Afrikaans today hold different views and there are some methodological problems with current studies. The main aim of this article is to problematize claims of language shift among Afrikaans speakers by analyzing relevant data from a larger scale survey of the language repertoires of an identified Afrikaans population (n = 244) in the Vaal Triangle region. The research method involved the adaptation of language history or experience questionnaires designed by bilingualism researchers to describe the language repertoires of a large population of multilingual students. The main findings of the study are that: (a) Afrikaans-English bilingualism (and bi-literacy) is prominent among the Afrikaans participants in the study; (b) the position of English as an important language in the bilingual repertoires of the participants is confirmed; and (c) Afrikaans seems firmly set as the language that contributes most to the identity of these participants. A pattern of stable bilingualism and bi-literacy emerges. The value of adding larger scale quantitative studies to complement smaller, qualitative studies in discussions of language shift and maintenance is confirmed by this study. The impact of the omission of Afrikaans-English bilingualism in the debate about Afrikaans is discussed.
