Are Afrikaners African?

[Rojava Free State]

African American English is basically the descendant of old southern English. If you listen to old recordings of southerners, especially Southern aristocracy, from before the mid 20th century, they sound alot like how old black people sound. It makes sense tbh. So while white southern English evolved into what it is today, African American English kept its non rhotic nature.

Southern English is still non-rhotic in the South-East region

It doesn't sound non rhotic in Georgia. It is kinda in Louisiana though.

[New Bremerton]

Ta-Nehisi Coates and MLK Jr. have this really quaint, upper-class-sounding speech pattern that, while still southern, sounds nothing like your typical, working-class, inner-city Ebonics, particularly when combined with standard English grammar. Think Hannibal Lecter or Arcturus Mengsk, or your typical white, southern slave-owning aristocrat. All villains, incidentally. It's a southern version of the British-influenced, non-rhotic, Mid-Atlantic accent that Roosevelt and Kennedy affected in their speeches. Rather than assimilate completely and lose their ethnolect, a combination of slavery, Jim Crow, and the constant desire to rebel against a status quo they feel is stacked against them has led African-Americans to retain their distinct culture, dialect and accent to this very day.

Like him or hate him, Coates' accent is very fascinating to listen to. His debating partner, Coleman Hughes, speaks with a more standard, General American accent. I predict Ebonics and the AAVE accent will evolve into more of an urban working-class phenomenon and less of a race-based ethnolect 50 years from now. America will have its very own Cockney accent.

Speaking of accents, and just to segue back to the topic at hand, white Afrikaners don't sound anything like their black counterparts, whereas white Jamaicans talk exactly like Sean Paul. Apartheid seems to have ingrained in white South Africans a sense of cultural separateness even 26 years since its dismantling.

Afrikaners are just one subgroup of white South Africans though. South Africa also has whites of mainly British descent whose native language is English rather than Dutch. These Anglophone whites have far less of a cohesive, ethnic identity and emotional connection to the land than the Dutch-speaking Afrikaners, but that doesn't make them any less African. They also tend to have somewhat less of a Dutch inflection. It's a little closer to a NZ accent or a quaint, southern English accent as it was spoken a century ago. Maybe the Dutch accent may end up becoming a working-class phenomenon among white South Africans. After all, the British subjugated and partially exterminated the Boers in 1898. I suspect there is also a considerable degree of cultural, linguistic, and genetic admixture between the two white subgroups.

This only reinforces the idea that Dutch-speaking Afrikaners are African, much more so than the British who arrived later. They are a distinct ethnic group native to South Africa who can trace their ancestry to the Boers, Trekboers, and Voortrekkers of a bygone era. Too bad their long-time insistence that they are nothing like the supposedly inferior blacks that outnumber them simultaneously undermines their case for many years to come. It doesn't help that certain elements within the far-right, black nationalist establishment are lusting for bloody vengeance and calling for the deaths of "Boers" for crimes that were committed a generation ago.

Afrikaners' native language is not Dutch. It's Afrikaans.

One question that gets asked very frequently within linguistic circles is how far do two dialects of a language have to diverge before they can be considered separate languages? This is true of Hokkien vs. Teochew, English vs. Scots, and Malay vs. Indonesian. I'm curious. As a native Dutch speaker yourself, how well can you understand Afrikaans? Does it feel like enough of a different language to you?

[Auze]

Southern English is still non-rhotic in the South-East region

It doesn't sound non rhotic in Georgia. It is kinda in Louisiana though.

I guess it depends on area in state. In the Carolinas it’s generally non-rhotic.

[The Blaatschapen]

Afrikaners' native language is not Dutch. It's Afrikaans.

One question that gets asked very frequently within linguistic circles is how far do two dialects of a language have to diverge before they can be considered separate languages? This is true of Hokkien vs. Teochew, English vs. Scots, and Malay vs. Indonesian. I'm curious. As a native Dutch speaker yourself, how well can you understand Afrikaans? Does it feel like enough of a different language to you?

My root dialect(Brabants) is a bit further from the Dutch that Afrikaans is derived from (Hollandic, Zeelandic). I can understand quite a bit though.

Yet, when I talk about Dutch literature, or when my teachers did, they were talking about books written in Dutch by Dutch, Flemish, Surinamese, (Dutch Antillian, Aruban, etc.), authors. Never Afrikaners. When talking about Dutch music, we're not including Die Antwoord.

[The Archregimancy]

<Sigh>

It's almost as if I didn't specifically outline that 'Jamaica has also never had a prime minister who wouldn't have been subject to racial segregation laws in the pre-civil rights movement American South, though a couple of the early PMs probably wouldn't have been asked to give up their seat and move to the back of the bus. Bustamante and the Manleys were all mixed-race. Even Edward Seaga was of mixed Lebanese, Afro-Jamaican, Scottish, and Indian descent rather than 'white'; whatever the latter term means in mixed-race societies'.

I'm usually fairly careful about accuracy in my posts, you know; that and I've worked in Jamaica.

Is there any country you haven't lived in?

Ancient egyptian curses from the pyramids, voodoo from Jamaica, haggis from Scotland. You are a scary man

Icelandic Hakarl?

Well, I did live in Iceland for a year back in the mid 1980s; so I have had the 'pleasure' of chasing down some hákarl with a shot of brennivín.

But for clarity, I never really lived in Jamaica - I merely spent some time working there. And yes, that is where I both worked and stayed. We used to wash artefacts on the veranda in the afternoon when the thunderstorms rolled in and stopped us from excavating the slave quarters.

But back to the tangential, if relevant, discussion point... if it's true that the Manleys and Seaga 'wouldn't have been asked to give up their seat and move to the back of the bus' in the pre-civil rights movement American South, it's likely equally true that their ability to command a Jamaican political base was at least partially based on their mixed-race heritage, and their ability to point to black ancestry.

So I do think Rojava is slightly missing the point.