A History of English Language

The nineteenth century and after 303
tiger. 21 Cookies (small cakes) is the same as our word, which we also learned from the
Dutch. Divide (watershed) is said to be borrowed from American use, and upcountry is
used much as we use it in the eastern states. The use of with without an object (Can I
come with?) can be found dialectally in this country, but we do not say “He threw me
over the hedge with a rock” (i.e., “He threw a stone over the hedge and hit me”), a
syntactic pattern that occurs in the English speech of Afrikaners and in the spoken
language of relatively uneducated English speakers. Occasionally an old word now lost to
Standard English in Britain has been preserved in South Africa, although this does not
seem to have happened so often as in America. Dispense or spens, meaning a pantry or
kitchen cupboard, is found in Chaucer (Al vinolent as botel in the spence: Summoner’s
Tale). It was doubtless carried to South Africa from one of the English dialects. The
variations of the English vocabulary in different parts of the former British Empire are so
fascinating that one is tempted to pursue them at too great a length. Enough has probably
been said to illustrate the individual character of many expressions in South African use.
In pronunciation the English of South Africa has been much influenced by the
pronunciation of Afrikaans and to a lesser extent by the speech of many Scottish
schoolmasters. 22 To Afrikaans it apparently owes not only the peculiar modification of
certain vowels (e.g., [pen] for pin; [kεb] for cab, etc.), but also its higher pitch and the
tendency to omit one of two or more consonants at the end of a word (e.g., tex for text).
South African shares with American English the general disposition to pronounce the r
when it appears in the spelling and to give full value to unaccented syllables
(extraordinary, rather than the English extraord’n’ry).
3. West and East Africa.
In other parts of sub-Saharan Africa that were once British colonies and are now
independent countries, the English language has a complex relationship to the many
African languages. Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Uganda, and other former
colonies have a choice of retaining their colonial linguistic inheritance or rejecting it. In
Nigeria three main African languages—Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo—and scores of
languages spoken by smaller groups exist alongside English. Although only a tiny
minority of the population speaks English, almost always as a second language, it is the
official language of the country. Ethnic jealousies that would arise from the selection of
one of the African languages, and the ad-
21
See also Charles Pettman, Africanderisms: A Glossary of South African Colloquial Words and
Phrases and Place and Other Names (London, 1913), and W.S.Mackie, “Afrikanerisms,” in
Standard Encydopedia of South Africa, 1 (Cape Town, 1970), 188.
22
See David Hopwood, South African English Pronunciation (Cape Town and Johannesburg,
1928), and L.W.Lanham, The Pronunciation of South African English (Cape Town, 1967).