Afrikaans as Standaard Gemiddelde Europees : Wanneer ‘n lid uit sy taalarea beweeg

Van Olmen, Daniel and Breed, Adri (2015) Afrikaans as Standaard Gemiddelde Europees : Wanneer ‘n lid uit sy taalarea beweeg. South African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 33 (2). pp. 227-246. ISSN 1727-9461

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Abstract

A recent trend in the study of Standard Average European is the extraterritorial perspective of examining the extent to which non-European languages have converged with this Sprachbund as a result of contact with one or more of its members. The present article complements this line of research in that it investigates the extent to which a European language has diverged from Standard Average European after leaving the linguistic area. The focus is on Dutch, a nuclear member of the Sprachbund, and Afrikaans, its colonial offshoot. The two languages are compared with respect to twelve of the most distinctive linguistic features of Standard Average European. Afrikaans is found to share ten of them with Dutch, including anticausative prominence and formally distinguished intensifiers and reflexives, and could therefore still be considered a core member of the Sprachbund, despite deviations in the expression of negative pronouns and the grammaticality of external possessor constructions. This relatively low degree of divergence may be attributed to the continuity from Settler Dutch to at least the variety of Afrikaans on which the standard language is based and to the important role that Dutch continued to play in the history of Afrikaans.