] becomes
[
]. In
Afrikaans loan-words, there is a consonant [x], as in gogga
[
], meaning insect, creepy-crawlie.
On this page, only the million of native anglophone (white) South Africans will be taken into consideration. In 1806, the first dozens of Englishmen arrived at the Cape of Good Hope, increasing in number up to 5,000 as early as 1820. It was thus relative exactly the same time when anglophone Australia was founded. At the Cape, though, the settlers did not come to an almost desert country with only some people wandering around and living the lives of the stone age, so that they could easily be thrusted away. This area was quite crowded, besides the bushmen and hottentots there were other peoples who had arrived quite recently: armed colonists from the overpopulated North of Southern Africa and Dutch peasants who ruled the Cape Colony from 1652 until it was conquered by British soldiers.
As a result, the English of South Africa have been a very small minority: Among the whites, who count only a fifth of the population, over 60% are of Afrikaner background (i.e. the former Dutch farmers; Lanham/Macdonald, 1979: 21). Those have influenced SAE a lot: There is a reasonable amount of Afrikaans borrowings, like kraal (native village), veld (flat open country), wildebeest (gnu), stoep (verandah), kopje (small hill), lekker bakkie (type of truck), dorp (village) etc. (Bähr, 1974: 312; Crystal, 1988: 244). From the surrounding majority of black nations only few words found their way into SAE: e.g. indaba (conference) (ibid.).
As for the accent, there is no doubt that, founded in the same period by similar people, the accents of Australian and South African English tend to be similar as well. We have got to distinguish the so-called "Conservative South African" (close to RP) and "Respectable South African" (Lanham, 1982: 328) from a broad "Extreme South African" (Wells, 1982b: 611). They are all said to be non-rhotic.
Not only words, also a lot of SAE phonetic peculiarities are
derived from Afrikaans: Unlike Southern English dialects and Broad
Australian no h-dropping occurs; instead, the [h] may be used in
its voiced variety. Before a fricative, in a vowel-plus-nasal
consonant combination, the vowel will be nasalized. SAE r tends to
be a flap rather than an approximant, esp. if linked to another
consonant. This is typical for U-RP, too, but is probably rather due
to Afrikaans influence here. In Extreme South African, voiceless
plosives are unaspirated. The diphthong [] becomes
[]. In
Afrikaans loan-words, there is a consonant [x], as in gogga
[], meaning insect, creepy-crawlie.
Other special features
to mention are the absence of vowels being
r-coloured, e.g. there [
]; the open o sound if StE is
closed here, thought [
]. In opposition to e.g. AusE,
the a of start, bath, palm is more back than in StE, up to
an open o in Extreme SAE (Wells, 1982b: 612-619).
Beside this South African English, which can be recognized easily (coined so much by Afrikaans), in the Republic of South Africa (Republiek van Suid-Afrika), other kinds of English are heard: the English of the Indian population, remarkable by Indian English features, the English of the Afrikaners, who speak it as good as they can, and the English of the black nations, coined by the (mostly) Bantu influence. But all those are out of the scope of this paper, as for all of them, it is not the mother tongue of the persons who speak it, but the lingua franca to get ahead in this multilingual state.
.