IX. Molo. Goeie dag. NdinguMarie. My naam is Marie.

I think I've already mentioned on this blog how surprised I am by the prevalence of Afrikaans I've encountered in and around Stellenbosch. It's everywhere. Signs on campus, in the grocery store, everywhere. It's everybody's automatic language of choice, despite the fact that the University requires undergrad students to take fifty percent of their classes in English. And the fact that Afrikaans - so I had been led to believe - carried with it a stigma of association by being the language of apartheid. It is spoken obviously by the white descendants of Afrikaners all over South Africa. But in the Western Cape, the province Stellenbosch is located in, it is also spoken by all the colored people (and no, that's not a politically incorrect term here; it's the official term that everyone uses all the time to refer to people who are multiracial; they had to explain that to all of us American kids who were scandalized by the use of the word). And many of them only speak Afrikaans.

One of the four courses I'm taking this quarter is "Culture, Language, and Identity" and yesterday, we had a guest professor, a linguistics prof at SU give us an overview of language politics and issues in SA and then also give us crash courses in isiXhosa and Afrikaans. It was great, she had us learn greetings, talk about the weather, talk about being sick, and introduce ourselves in both languages. It was super interesting and I'm impressed how much we learned via her 5th grade Spanish class style of teaching language. She literally had us sing the phrases and sentences to the tune of "London is burning" because she thought we'd all know it because we're American and America used to be a British colony...yeah. That's the first time anyone has ever assumed something about me based on my status as a citizen of a country that used to be a British colony...well over 200 years ago. It really made me think about the difference in experience with colonialism experienced in the US versus in Africa.

Anyway, it was really cool. And I love learning languages. But I've only had experiences with Romantic languages - French, Spanish, Latin. Afrikaans is a Germanic African language. And isiXhosa is a Bantu African language. The pronunciation and expression of both of these languages is about as far from English as it gets. On the walk home from class, two of my friends and I tried quizzing each other and speaking in the two languages, just greeting each other and introducing ourselves and talking about the weather. I'm pretty sure we sounded like we were calling horses when we tried practicing the Xhosas clicks, and that we sounded like we had bad colds and were excessively clearing our throats when we tried pronouncing any Afrikaans word. And my throat hurt from attempting Afrikaans. No joke. I also realized when we were about half way home that translated to Northwestern's campus, this would be the equivalent of a couple foreign students walking around campus saying to each other and butchering the pronunciation of "Hello. How are you? My name is ___." Then I decided we should just wait til we got back to our dorm and watch YouTube videos and practice there.

One thing I found super interesting was an "interview" the professor conducted with one of her students, a native isiXhosa speaker. Apparently, in the Western Cape, prospective employers must speak English and Afrikaans if they want to get jobs. This student was fluent in English, the language of her primary school and tertiary school, but was learning Afrikaans and wasn't yet fluent. When asked whether she would send her kids to a Xhosa school or an English school, she stated firmly that she would only send them to an English school because that is the language of the future and even if it meant her language would die, she wouldn't want to handicap her kids for the rest of their lives, but give them the opportunity to make better lives for themselves; and she saw English as the one necessary tool to achieve that.

Although South Africa has eleven official languages, not every region provides services in every language. Tertiary education is only formally taught in English (and Afrkaans at Stellenbosch University). Everyone is taught some level of English in primary school. And the other nine languages are localized to the area of predominance. Despite the fact that millions of people speak isiXhosa and are not comfortably proficient in English or Afrikaans in the Western Cape, health, legal, and educational resources are not readily available here. And translators are not provided, so nurses, other officers and civil servants often end up translating, which poses all sorts of ethical questions.

I don't know how I managed to turn a 5th grade Spanish class day into a serious analysis of language politics in South Africa. Maybe it was all the readings I skimmed in the library before class yesterday about linguistics and language politics and sociology? Maybe it's the fact that I'm a Northwestern student and can't get away from that? Maybe it's just because it's so fascinating and certainly a real-life issue South Africans face every day?

 In case you're wanting to test out your Afrikaans...

...or your isiXhosa