JONATHAN JANSEN: Language chauvinists won’t win Afrikaans any favours
Free to read | In aggressively imposing their mother tongue on others, they are just shooting themselves in the foot
05 December 2019 - 08:46
Living in Stellenbosch, I find myself moving constantly between the beauty of the Afrikaans language and its biting chauvinism. Afrikaans can be perplexing if you’re black and not a native speaker of the language. This is how it works.
The one moment I am reading the stirring Afrikaans poetry of Shirmoney Rhode, citing passages from her work in the English-Afrikaans book that honours my mother, Song for Sarah/Lied vir Sarah. The next moment this happens in a Stellenbosch bookshop, an exchange I posted online:..
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