Namibian Black German
| Namibian Black German | |
|---|---|
| Namibian Kiche Duits | |
| Kiche Duits | |
| Native to | Namibia |
| Ethnicity | Black Namibians, generally Herero and Nama |
Native speakers | None, possibly with some minor transmission to youth |
German-based creole | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (mis) |
| Glottolog | None |
Namibian Black German, also NBG, (
History
Colonial acquisition of German in Namibia often took place outside of formal education and was primarily self-taught. Like many pidgin languages, Namibian Black German developed through limited access to the standard language and was restricted to the work environment.
Currently several hundred thousand Namibians speak German as a second language – many, but not most of them Black, and while Namibian German often does not adhere to standard German, it is not pidgin.[4]
Prepositions
English and Afrikaans have left an influence on the development of NBG, leading to three primary prepositional patterns:[5]
- adding a preposition where Standard German would use the accusative
- dropping prepositions which are usually present in Standard German
- changing the preposition that is required by the verb
Examples
 |
Examples of phrases with Standard German equivalents:
- Lange nicht sehen - long no see ("Lange nicht gesehen")
- Was Banane kosten? - How much does the banana cost? ("Was kostet die/eine Banane?")
- spät Uhr - 'late hour', meaning 'it's late' ("es ist spät")
- Herr fahren Jagd, nicht Haus - "Master went hunting and he's not at home" ("Der Herr ist zur Jagd gefahren und ist nicht zu Hause")
References
Further reading
- Deumert, A (2003). "Markedness and salience in language contact and second-language acquisition: evidence from a non-canonical contact language". Language Sciences. 25 (6): 561–613. .
- Deumert, A. (2010). Historical Sociolinguistics in a Colonial World, Methodological Considerations [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://hison.sbg.ac.at/content/conferences/handoutsslides2010/Deumert3.pdf
- Deumert, A (2009). "Namibian Kiche Duits: The Making (and Decline) of Neo-African Language". Journal of Germanic Linguistics. 21 (4): 349–417. .
- Langer, N., McLelland, N. (2011). German Studies: Language and Linguistics. The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, 71, 564–594.
- Shah, Sheena (2007). "German in a contact situation: The case of Namibian German" (PDF). EDUSA. 2 (2): 20–44. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-07-13.
- Stolberg, D. (2012). When a standard language goes colonial: Language attitudes, language planning, and destandardization during German colonialism. 25th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, Workshop 2: Foundations of Language Standardization. Retrieved from http://conference.hi.is/scl25/files/2012/06/Stolberg.pdf
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