Article published In:
Journal of Pidgin and Creole LanguagesVol. 4:2 (1989) ► pp.211–240
The Origins of Fanagalo
This paper examines, and refutes, the currently most popular hypothesis concerning the origin of Fanagalo, namely, that it arose on the plantation fields of Natal among indentured East Indian migrants who arrived there from 1860 onwards. Can a pidgin be initiated by a group of migrants from differing linguistic backgrounds in a plantation situation, and still remain in widespread use without showing any substrate influences? If the Indian origin hypothesis is correct, this would indeed be the case: a "crystallized" southern African Pidgin, stable for about a hundred years, would have been created in the sugar plantations of Natal by migrant indentured Indian workers without any tangible influences from any of the five or so Indic and Dravidian languages involved. However, structural and lexical evidence indicates otherwise. Written sources (a first-hand account by an English settler from about 1905, and two published accounts by an English missionary) suggest that the use of Fanagalo in Natal predated the arrival of Indian immigrants by at least ten years. Regarding the origins of Fanagalo, one other viable alternative is examined — the Eastern Cape in the early 1800s. The conclusion is that the most likely site for Fanagalo's genesis was Natal in the mid-nineteenth century.
Cited by (37)
Cited by 37 other publications
Cowie, Claire
2023. Interview with Rajend Mesthrie. Journal of English Linguistics 51:4 ► pp. 405 ff. 
Ostler, Nicholas
2022. The Emergence of Lingua Francas. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 403 ff.
Hickey, Raymond
2019. English in South Africa: Contact and Change. In English in Multilingual South Africa, ► pp. 3 ff.
H. Ekkehard Wolff
2019. The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics,
Hurst, Ellen
2018. Fanakalo. In The Social and Political History of Southern Africa's Languages, ► pp. 93 ff.
Mahoney, Michael R.
2018. Ethnicity in Southern Africa. In A Companion to African History, ► pp. 179 ff.
Ditsele, Thabo & Ellen Hurst
2016. Travelling terms and local innovations: The <i>tsotsitaal</i> of the North West province, South Africa. Literator 37:1
Sanders, Mark
2016. Why are you Learning Zulu?. Interventions 18:6 ► pp. 806 ff.
Roberts, Sarah J. & Joan Bresnan
2008. Retained inflectional morphology in pidgins: A typological study. Linguistic Typology 12:2
Bakker, Peter
2003. Pidgin inflectional morphology and its implications for creole morphology. In Yearbook of Morphology 2002 [Yearbook of Morphology, ], ► pp. 3 ff.
Adendorff, Ralph
2002. Fanakalo: a pidgin in South Africa. In Language in South Africa, ► pp. 179 ff.
Mesthrie, R.
2002. Language change, survival, decline: Indian languages in South Africa. In Language in South Africa, ► pp. 161 ff.
Mesthrie, R.
2006. Fanagalo. In Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, ► pp. 430 ff.
Baker, Philip
1994. Review of Mesthrie (1991): Language in indenture. A sociolinguistic history of Bhojpuri-Hindi in South Africa. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 9:1 ► pp. 168 ff.
Meyerhoff, Miriam & Nancy Niedzielski
1994. Resistance to creolization: An interpersonal and intergroup account. Language & Communication 14:4 ► pp. 313 ff.
MESTHRIE, RAJEND
1990. Did the butler do it?: on an analogue of Butler English in Natal, South Africa. World Englishes 9:3 ► pp. 281 ff.
MESTHRIE, RAJEND
1996. Imagint excusations: Missionary English in the nineteenth century Cape Colony, South Africa. World Englishes 15:2 ► pp. 139 ff.
Mesthrie, Rajend
1998. Words across worlds: aspects of language contact and language learning in the Eastern Cape, 1800–1850. African Studies 57:1 ► pp. 5 ff.
Mesthrie, Rajend
2006. Subordinate immigrant languages and language endangerment: Two community studies from Kwazulu-Natal. Language Matters 37:1 ► pp. 3 ff.
Mesthrie, Rajend
2014. How non-Indo-European is Fanakalo pidgin?: Selected understudied structures in a Bantu-lexified pidgin with Germanic substrates. In Pidgins and Creoles beyond Africa-Europe Encounters [Creole Language Library, 47], ► pp. 85 ff.
Mesthrie, Rajend
2015. English in India and South Africa: Comparisons, Commonalities and Contrasts. African Studies 74:2 ► pp. 186 ff.
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.
Mesthrie, Rajend
2019. Fanakalo as a mining language in South Africa: A new overview. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2019:258 ► pp. 13 ff.
Mesthrie, Rajend
2021. Contacts and contexts: Varying diasporic interactions and koineisation outcomes for Indian languages in South Africa. Journal of Sociolinguistics 25:5 ► pp. 703 ff.
[no author supplied]
2012. Increasing Conflict among Natal Africans, 1879–1906. In The Other Zulus, ► pp. 83 ff.
[no author supplied]
2012. Epilogue. In The Other Zulus, ► pp. 217 ff.
[no author supplied]
2012. Introduction. In The Other Zulus, ► pp. 1 ff.
[no author supplied]
2012. The Role of Migrant Labor in the Spread of Zulu Ethnicity, 1886–1906. In The Other Zulus, ► pp. 117 ff.
[no author supplied]
2012. Notes. In The Other Zulus, ► pp. 225 ff.
[no author supplied]
2012. The Failure of Zulu Ethnic Integration in the Precolonial Zulu Kingdom. In The Other Zulus, ► pp. 21 ff.
[no author supplied]
2012. Natal Africans’ Turn to Dinuzulu, 1898–1905. In The Other Zulus, ► pp. 150 ff.
[no author supplied]
2012. Bibliography. In The Other Zulus, ► pp. 261 ff.
[no author supplied]
2012. A Zulu King Too Strong to Love, a Colonial State Too Weak to Hate, 1838–1879. In The Other Zulus, ► pp. 47 ff.
[no author supplied]
2012. The Poll Tax Protests and Rebellion, 1905–1906. In The Other Zulus, ► pp. 182 ff.
[no author supplied]
2013. Reference Guide for Varieties of English. In A Dictionary of Varieties of English, ► pp. 363 ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. Lingua Francas. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 401 ff.
[no author supplied]
2023. References. In Sounds of English Worldwide, ► pp. 354 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.