Indigenous and Afrikaans Borrowings in South African Writers: J.M. Coetzee and Zakes Mda

Abstract

[eng] South Africa offers a great cultural diversity due to the huge amount of groups that gradually settled in the country throughout the centuries – from the Khoe-San people, the first settlers, to European immigrants. Hence, the nation's linguistic diversity is very rich: there are eleven official languages – being Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans the most spoken ones – and many non-official languages spoken in the whole country. Since the establishment of the English language during the settlement of British colonies in the region, South African English has been influenced by many languages which have had an impact on aspects such as vocabulary, pronunciation or grammar. The aim of this paper resides on creating a data of indigenous and Afrikaans borrowings in South African English to classify them into different categories and analyze them. In order to do this, the borrowings have been collected from three novels of two South African writers – Life and Times of Michael K (1983) by J.M. Coetzee and Ways of Dying (1995) and The Heart of Redness (2000) by Zakes Mda. This study proves how both authors use cultural borrowings but the quantity, the language of origin and their translation techniques differ from one another due to their different backgrounds.