Divided by a Shared Language: Afrikaans and Raciolinguistic Projects in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Afrikaans, a Dutch-based African semi-creole hijacked by Afrikaner nationalism and used as a tool of white supremacy under Apartheid, is at the centre of vociferous post-Apartheid contestations. Its racist past fuels ongoing negative perceptions and a shrinking public presence. Yet, as Afrikaners are losing their sole prerogative over the language, Afrikaans is increasingly mobilized for identitarian and political movements among its majority non-white speakers. Afrikaans thus offers a theoretically and politically generative opportunity to explore the imbrication of language and race in deeply racialized, unequal, and multilingual post-colonial spaces.This dissertation is an immersive ethnography of Afrikaans raciolinguistic boundary formation in post-Apartheid South Africa. By synthesizing race, boundary, and raciolinguistic scholarship, I examine how language constructs both hegemonic and marginalized racialized identities in a multilingual post-colonial space. I ask: how are Afrikaans language communities and racial boundaries co-constructed, maintained, and contested? How does Afrikaans remain marked as white? How do racialized Afrikaans speakers negotiate raciolinguistic identity? To situate contemporary negotiations of Afrikaans racial boundaries within historical and structural constraints, I draw on sociological literature on race (Bonilla-Silva 1997; Omi and Winant 2014) and group boundary scholarship (Brubaker 2002; Lamont and Molnár 2002; Wimmer 2013). To narrow the gap in theorizing language’s role in racialization, I build upon raciolinguistics (Alim, Rickford, and Ball 2016; Rosa and Flores 2017) to coin the concept of Raciolinguistic Project (RLP), a framework that accounts for both structural power dynamics and individual agency in leveraging Afrikaans to construct, maintain, and challenge racial boundaries. Drawing on immersive ethnographic fieldwork, focus groups, and interviews, I analyze how Afrikaans raciolinguistic entrepreneurs source sociolinguistic and historiographical materials from an erstwhile shared creolized continuum, to constitute two competing RLPs in dialogical tension: the White and Brown Afrikaans RLPs. Using creolization as an analytical and interpretative methodology, I identify common dimensions across projects. Despite producing white and Brown subjects who occupy vastly unequal positions of power and enjoy unequal access to institutional, symbolic, and social resources, both Raciolinguistic projects take language as the starting point for defining racialized group boundaries. Both the White and Brown Afrikaans RLPs appropriate Afrikaans to advance claims of indigeneity and historical rootedness; they claim linguistic marginalization to support a discourse of victimhood, often introducing religious or spiritual themes in framing associated forms of resistance; they seek to achieve authenticity by deflecting mixedness, mapped onto concerns of language purity and form; they brighten group boundaries in relation to both Afrikaans and non-Afrikaans speaking others. A latent creolizing undercurrent continually undermines the stability of the constituted raciolinguistic boundaries. This research foregrounds language in racial boundary making, expanding raciolinguistic literature by illustrating the dialogic co-construction of hegemonic and racialized identities through competing RLPs.

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