A history of the English Language

biltong
(strips of dried meat), 
braaivleis
(a barbecue), 
donga
(ravine), 
gogga
(insect), 
koeksisters
(a confection), 
kopje
(hill), 
lekker
(nice), 
mealies
(Indian 
corn), 
ou
(fellow, U.S. 
guy
),
 spruit
(gully), 
stoep
(verandah, U.S. 
stoop
), and 
veldskoen
(hide-shoes).
20
As in Australian English, a number of good English words are used in 
quite new senses. South African racial policies gave a new meaning to 
location
as an area 
in which black Africans are required to live. 
Lands
in South Africa are just those portions 
of a farm that can be used for cultivation of crops, 
camp
refers to the fenced-in portion of 
a farm, and the 
leopard
(Afrikaans 
tier,
from 
tyger
) is sometimes called a
20 
William Branford, “Aardvark to Zwarthout: Social and Historical Aspects of the South African 
English Vocabulary,” in 
Seven Studies in English,
ed. Gildas Roberts (Cape Town and London, 
1971), p. 134. 
A history of the english language 302

---

tiger
.
21
Cookies
(small cakes) is the same as our word, which we also learned from the 
Dutch. 
Divide
(watershed) is said to be borrowed from American use, and 
upcountry
is 
used much as we use it in the eastern states. The use of 
with
without an object 
(Can I 
come with?)
can be found dialectally in this country, but we do not say “He threw me 
over the hedge with a rock” (i.e., “He threw a stone over the hedge and hit me”), a 
syntactic pattern that occurs in the English speech of Afrikaners and in the spoken 
language of relatively uneducated English speakers. Occasionally an old word now lost to 
Standard English in Britain has been preserved in South Africa, although this does not 
seem to have happened so often as in America. 
Dispense
or 
spens,
meaning a pantry or 
kitchen cupboard, is found in Chaucer (Al vinolent as botel in the spence: 
Summoner’s 
Tale
). It was doubtless carried to South Africa from one of the English dialects. The 
variations of the English vocabulary in different parts of the former British Empire are so 
fascinating that one is tempted to pursue them at too great a length. Enough has probably 
been said to illustrate the individual character of many expressions in South African use. 
In pronunciation the English of South Africa has been much influenced by the 
pronunciation of Afrikaans and to a lesser extent by the speech of many Scottish 
schoolmasters.
22
To Afrikaans it apparently owes not only the peculiar modification of 
certain vowels (e.g., [pen] for 
pin;
[k
ε
b] for 
cab,
etc.), but also its higher pitch and the 
tendency to omit one of two or more consonants at the end of a word (e.g., 
tex
for 
text
). 
South African shares with American English the general disposition to pronounce the 
r
when it appears in the spelling and to give full value to unaccented syllables 
(
extraordinary,
rather than the English 
extraord’n’ry
). 
3. 
West and East Africa.
In other parts of sub-Saharan Africa that were once British colonies and are now 
independent countries, the English language has a complex relationship to the many 
African languages. Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Uganda, and other former 
colonies have a choice of retaining their colonial linguistic inheritance or rejecting it. In 
Nigeria three main African languages—Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo—and scores of 
languages spoken by smaller groups exist alongside English. Although only a tiny 
minority of the population speaks English, almost always as a second language, it is the 
official language of the country. Ethnic jealousies that would arise from the selection of 
one of the African languages, and the ad- 
21 
See also Charles Pettman,