The Poetic Utilization of Dialectal Varieties of the Afrikaans Language for Strategic Purposes in the Southern African Context

Afrikaans is a southern African language named after the continent on which it has evolved from seventeenth-century Dutch in a complex contact situation between European settlers, their imported slaves, and indigenous peoples. It was standardized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for literary purposes, among others. The poetic utilization of dialectal or colloquial varieties of Afrikaans, however, has been an important trend in its literary history, especially since the advent of the so-called Movement of the 1960s. The relevant varieties include geolects like Karoo Afrikaans, but also sociolects like “Loslitafrikaans” (informal Afrikaans, characterized by being mixed with English), Cape Afrikaans, and Griqua Afrikaans. As a stylistic device, the use of dialectal Afrikaans has served both literary-strategic purposes (literary renewal) and socio-political aims (as actuality literature or socio-politically engaged poetry). As a whole, it transpires that the pressing socio-political and broader cultural conditions that have dictated past developments, or are driving present ones, in South and southern Africa (resistance to nineteenth-century efforts at anglicizing southern Africa, the advent and decline of Apartheid, the increasingly hegemonic position of English in the post-Apartheid dispensation) loom large behind the relative importance of this trend in Afrikaans poetry.