User:Maddierocco/Fanagalo

Article Draft

Article body

Fanagalo, or Fanakalo, is a vernacular or pidgin based primarily on Zulu that arouse as a contact variety enabling communication between European settlers and Indigenous South Africans. It is used as a lingua franca, mainly in the gold, diamond, coal and copper mining industries in South Africa and to a lesser extent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

By the time independence came – or in the case of South Africa, universal suffrage – English had become sufficiently widely spoken and understood that it became the lingua franca, enabling different ethnic groups in the same country to communicate with each other, and Fanakalo use declined. In addition, there was a conscious effort to promote the use of English in domains where Fanagalo was predominantly used as a means of control. Despite this decline in use, Fanagalo is still accepted as a part of mining culture and identity and is seen as a de facto policy and maintains its significance in its domain of use. The strong identity Fangalo speakers shared enabled homogeneity and therefore they were resistant to the inclusion of English and is likely why the pidgin is still used today.

Fanagalo is one of a number of African pidgin languages that developed during the colonial period to promote ease of communication. Adendorff (2002) suggests that it developed in the nineteenth century in KwaZulu-Natal Province as a way for English colonists to communicate with the Indigenous community and was also used as a lingua franca between English and Dutch speaking colonists.

Adendorff describes two variants of the language, Mine Fanagalo and Garden Fanagalo. The latter name refers to its use with servants in households and was previously known as Kitchen Kaffir. Both Fanagalo and Kitchen Kaffir contributed to linguistic colonization as Kitchen Kaffir was created to segregate the Settlers from the Indigenous communities and as means to exercise control.(The term "kaffir" tended, in South Africa, to be used as a derogatory term for black people, and is now considered extremely offensive. It is derived from the Arab word Kafir, meaning unbeliever.[3])

Two factors kept Fanagalo from achieving status as a primary language. Firstly the segregation of Fanagalo to work-related domains of use and an absence of leisure uses. Secondly, women and children were not permitted to speak Fanagalo, meaning that family communication was abysmal and there were little ways to expand the uses of the pidgin.