Present-Day Afrikaans in Contact with English

Afrikaans has been in contact for the past two centuries. Such contact and its linguistic effects have often been interpreted as a threat to the vitality or linguistic integrity of the Afrikaans language. Code-switching and code-mixing are an area of extensive influence and serve as an overt identity marker for many Afrikaans speakers, most particularly its Coloured native speakers in the Western Cape. Vocabulary borrowing, including loan translation, occur in areas where speakers of Afrikaans come into contact with a changing world through English, in domains such as government, industry, sport and entertainment, and modern technology. Grammatical changes under English influence are attested in areas where Afrikaans experiences ongoing change away from its Dutch input forms, but also show creativity on the part of Afrikaans speakers, and not simple adoption of English patterns, for instance in complementiser constructions, newly grammaticalised demonstratives, and pronominal uses of een ‘one’.