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Article published In:
Language of Empire, Language of Power
Edited by Kees Versteegh
[Language Ecology 2:1/2] 2018
► pp. 91–111

Settler colonialism speaks

Early contact varieties in Namibia during German colonial rule

| University of Cape Town

In this article I explore a particular set of contact varieties that emerged in Namibia, a former German colony. Historical evidence comes from the genre of autobiographic narratives that were written by German settler women. These texts provide – ideologically filtered – descriptions of domestic life in the colony and contain observations about everyday communication practices. In interpreting the data I draw on the idea of ‘jargon’ as developed within creolistics as well as on Chabani Manganyi’s (1970) comments on the ‘master-servant communication complex’, and Beatriz Lorente’s (2017) work on ‘scripts of servitude’. I suggest that to interpret the historical record is a complex hermeneutic endeavour: on the one hand, the examples given are likely to tell us ‘something’ about communication in the colony; on the other hand, the very description of communicative interactions is rooted in what I call a ‘script of supremacy’, which is quite unlike the ‘atonement politics’ (McIntosh 2014) of postcolonial language learning.

Keywords: Namibia, German, Otjiherero, colonialism, creolistics, jargons, scripts of servitude, scripts of supremacy
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Language and colonization
  • 2.Historical overview: Namibia under German colonial rule
  • 3.Jargons: Margins within margins
  • 4.Colonial encounters: Settler women and their Dienstboten (‘servants’)
  • 5.The master-servant communication complex: Scripts of servitude, scripts of supremacy
  • 6.Conclusion: Jargon or pidgin? Reflections on diachronic continuities (and subversions)
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/le.18006.deu
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