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Part of
Pidgins and Creoles beyond Africa-Europe Encounters
Edited by Isabelle Buchstaller, Anders Holmberg and Mohammad Almoaily
[Creole Language Library 47] 2014
► pp. 85–100

How non-Indo-European is Fanakalo pidgin?

Selected understudied structures in a Bantu-lexified pidgin with Germanic substrates

| University of Cape Town

Fanakalo is a southern African pidgin whose main lexifier is Zulu, a non-Indo-European language, and whose genesis lies with Europeans as “imperfect learners” and Africans as “superstrate speakers” in the 19th CE. The question can therefore be raised whether this reversal of social relations and the identity of those who were doing the initial language learning and pidgin creation resulted in a typological reversal too (compared to, say, Caribbean contact varieties). The answer appears to be in the affirmative. The question can also be raised how non-Indo-European this pidgin is. This time the answer is less clear: while the vocabulary is largely from Southern Bantu, its grammar resembles a basic English, or – more plausibly – a basic analytic SVO code.

Published online: 29 January 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cll.47.05mes
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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Hurst, Ellen
2018. Fanakalo. In The Social and Political History of Southern Africa's Languages, ► pp. 93 ff. DOI logo
Mesthrie, Rajend
2017. Pidginization versus second language acquisition. In Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas [Creole Language Library, 53], ► pp. 323 ff. DOI logo
H. Ekkehard Wolff
2019. The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics, DOI logo

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