Abstract

OLIVIER, Bert. The experience of Afrikaans as a conference language in a predominantly English-language global environment. Tydskr. geesteswet. [online]. 2025, vol.65, n.1, pp.427-440. ISSN 2224-7912.  https://doi.org/10.17159/2224-7912/2025/v65n1a18.

A title such as the above may come across as strange, even eccentric, but when it is placed in the global context of the dominance of (particularly American) English, it makes perfect sense to anyone who understands, and is capable of experiencing, the delight of communicating in one's mother tongue with colleagues and friends who do not need one's words to be translated into English. Provisionally this should be understood from the perspective of Heidegger's notion of language as "the house (home) of being", the ontological implications of which entail the claim that, even if being is more than (human) language, as far as humans are concerned, one can only grasp being insofar as it is encountered in this "house" (language). Heidegger's notion is matched by Gadamer's commensurate remark, "Being that can be understood, is language" - again, not a denial of being's extra- or trans-linguistic ontological status, but simply an affirmation that human beings are ineluctably dependent on language (in the broadest sense of the term) for coming to grips with being in any form or incarnation. To be able to comprehend what is meant by the above claims, Fredric Jameson's (personal) remark concerning what he termed the "geopolitical aesthetic" has to be clarified. What he meant by this was that, by the final decades of the previous century American cultural values, particularly as embodied in (American) English, had become pervasive in the international cultural sphere, particularly in the guise of Hollywood artefacts - so much so that the only two cultures which, in Jameson's estimation, were still capable of "holding out" against American encroachment, were the French and the Cuban, both of which produced artefacts which are authentic embodiments of their respective cultures, in the process resisting being swamped by American cultural products. This interesting phenomenon - a kind of linguistic neocolonialism - was placed in a different perspective when my partner and I attended an educational conference in Osaka, Japan, about 10 years ago. We listened to a presentation where two linguists - a Japanese woman and an English man - reported on the high statistical frequency with which Japanese as a spoken language was pervaded by American-English expressions, even when Japanese equivalents were readily available to the Japanese speakers. The husband-and-wife team of linguists did not offer an explanation for this phenomenon which, one has reason to believe, has counterparts in other linguistic-cultural spheres, including where young Afrikaans-speakers frequently intersperse their Afrikaans with American-English words and expressions, such as "cool". Nevertheless, the explanation for this ostensibly incongruous phenomenon is not itself linguistic, but anthropological: it is a contemporary variation on the familiar theme of "cargo cults" which, according to anthropologists, lends itself to being interpreted in terms ofperceived differences in cultural power pertaining to colonising and colonised cultures, respectively. What are "cargo cults"? These are quasi-religious movements among "primitive" ("premodern") people that centre on the belief that the ancestors would send them shiploads of "cargo" (or "goods") comprising western artefacts such as guns, jewellery and other trinkets, to enable them to gain cultural independence and prosperity. In other words, the "cargo" is a metonymy for the superior colonial (or colonising) culture. Today the increasing appearance of American-English words and phrases, seamlessly interwoven in sentences spoken in other languages, signifies a contemporary manifestation of "cargo cults", albeit in non-religious form. Like the "cargo" which, in earlier beliefs, would impart unheard-of power to previously disempowered people, the interspersion of such words and phrases in spoken sentences of other languages (including Afrikaans) signifies a similar (unconscious) aspiration to the neocolonial cultural power metonymically represented by these American-English linguistic migrants. The point of this anthropological digression is that, speaking a language like Afrikaans in public, without recourse to the cultural flotsam and jetsam of (especially American) English - which may take a conscious effort - brings the rich reward of enjoyable cultural self-empowerment to those who engage in it. This enriching experience may take several forms, one of which is the philosophical exchange between colleagues at the biennial conference(s) of the NAWG (Nederlands-Afrikaanse Wysgerige Vereniging, or Dutch-Afrikaans Philosophical Society), conducted in either Afrikaans, Dutch or Flemish among participants who - given the fundamental linguistic similarities of these three languages - understand one another. But it is not only mutual understanding that is at stake here. In terms of Heidegger's characterisation of language as "the house of being", it means that there is something about mother-tongue speech (and writing) that activates a "homecoming" of sorts. What this means is that, if language may generally be seen as essential for understanding the being of things and events - and not only that, but "being as such" - then the first language a human being learns (in the sense that she or he gains competence in the language) could be regarded as occupying a kind of paradigmatic place in this "relationship", if it could be called that, between language and being. "Language is the house of being" denotes an intimate relationship, even a primordial "oneness" of language and being, although, paradoxically - as noted - the one cannot be reduced to the other. Put differently, in some distorted or perverted forms of language-use, "being" could be said to be "not at home" (think of the discourse of "woke" culture), while "being" ineluctably exceeds language in a manner that is inaccessible to the latter; as soon as being is articulated in language, it has been brought into its ambit, or perhaps rather, being has entered its linguistic home, as it were. The argument concerning mother tongue language is that, given the above, it is - metaphorically speaking - the first "home of being" with which a person becomes familiar, and every subsequent ontological "home" (or "house") of language that such a person may get to know, will be appropriated on the basis of the familiarity that he or she has with theirfirst, paradigmatic linguistic home. This does not mean that any second or third linguistic home may not become as familiar as the first one - after all, given the translatability of one language to another presupposes the "primordial" oneness of language - but the paradigmatic status of the first natural language to instantiate language in the more encompassing sense remains, as demonstrated in the oft-encountered remark, "As one would say in (for example) Afrikaans..." (followed by the apposite saying). These considerations are brought to life at the biennial conferences of the Nederlands-Afrikaanse Wysgerige Vereniging (Dutch-Afrikaans Philosophical Society), rotating between Holland, Belgium and South Africa, when participants from these three countries communicate with one another in their own historically and semantically, as well as syntactically related language(s), which - for the duration of the conference(s) - seem to escape the global context where American English dominates. Having written predominantly in English during the apartheid years, it was a kind of liberation for myself to rediscover the graphic qualities of Afrikaans as a written language, and in the context of the NAWG conferences this turned out to be the case, too, for spoken Afrikaans, for reasons mentioned above. What has to be added is that, in contrast with speaking Afrikaans socially, among friends - when one relies mostly on colloquial Afrikaans - speaking it among philosophical colleagues from three different, but linguistically closely related language groups, seems to concentrate one's linguistic powers of articulation to the point where one truly enters the "house of being" through the language one speaks. This is demonstrated by discussing two papers presented by a Dutch and a Flemish delegate, respectively, at one of these conferences, and by showing how thinking and speaking combine - during the ensuing discussions - to "guard" the house of being, namely language in the guise of one's mother tongue.

Keywords : Afrikaans-speaking; American English; Gadamer; globalisation; Heidegger.

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