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afrikaans
June 2009 
Afrikaans
Posted on Mar 12th, 2008
by 
Melinda
Melinda
Having grown up in South Africa, my home language is Afrikaans. It is a modified, simplified, and then re-complexified form of Dutch. This process have been going on since 1652 when the first Dutch colonists established a provisioning station at the Cape of Good Hope, now Cape Town. The first bunch of people who thought it was important enough, decided to name this new language after the continent in which it took its new form, and from which it received much of it's added vocabulary.
My husband and I moved to California ten years ago. His home language is English, but he understands, and can speak Afrikaans with some felicity.
The point of this post, is to note that my retention of my mother-tongue has been slipping. Increasingly, during the fortnightly calls to my parents, I find myself at a loss for words: searching for the correct Afrikaans words - words which used to flow through me like a river.
I don't want to lose this precious thing: a living language with forms of expression found nowhere else on the planet. Being able to express something is a little like giving birth. It is making a kind of life possible for the thing expressed. What shall I do?
Access: Public
Talk Afrikaans at home instead of English ? :)
That would be the first thing to do, right? There are two reasons why we don't speak Afrikaans on a regular (enough) basis at home:
1. My husband is not very comfortable in Afrikaans because he grew up in an English-speaking home, and so he prefers to speak English.
2. My son understands very little Afrikaans and gets anxious when my husband and I say more than a few sentences in it. We didn't teach my son Afrikaans at the outset because we thought English was more appropriate for this part of the world, which we have chosen to make our home. The latest research suggests (if not conclusively) that children do better when they learn one language first, and are then gradually exposed to the idea - and some phrases, words, or songs - of other languages. Second and third languages are apparently best learned starting at about age 6, when they have successfully integrated the structure of the first language. This is similar to my own experience - I started to learn English at age six and did not find it very difficult. Afrikaans served as a useful and well-formed “base” which I actively used to note similarities and differences between it and English. Much as I am doing now while learning Spanish - except now I'm using English as my “base”.
I do, however, plan to teach my son both Afrikaans and Spanish as soon as he seems ready for it - which should be in about 18 months or so - depending on his grasp of English. He has shown a great interest in both languages and to keep his interest going I teach him little songs from each language (the Spanish ones I have to search for, the Afrikaans ones from memory) and I make a game of trying to translate a phrase or two from some songs into one of the other languages. At his current age (4 years) greetings, pleasantries and a few common expressions (like “Help me please!”) is all I try to convey.