“Today, Kaaps is most commonly used by largely working-class speakers on the Cape Flats, an area in Cape Town where many disenfranchised people were forcibly moved by the apartheid government.” This is what Professor Adam Haupt, the director of the Centre for Film & Media Studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT) who was involved in the project says as he reflects on the recent launch of the first-ever Afrikaaps dictionary.
According to The Conversation, Haupt indicated that the language has been in existence since the 1500s but the Kaaps language, synonymous with Cape Town in South Africa, has never had a dictionary until now.
Haupt says the Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps has been launched by a collective of academic and community stakeholders – the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape along with the hip hop-driven community NGO, Heal the Hood Project.
“The dictionary in Kaaps, English and Afrikaans, holds the promise of being a powerful democratic resource. Kaaps or Afrikaaps is a language created in settler-colonial South Africa, developed by the 1500s. It took shape as a language during encounters between indigenous African (Khoi and San), South-East Asian, Dutch, Portuguese and English people.”
Haupt adds that it could be argued that Kaaps predates the emergence of an early form of Kaaps-Hollands (the South African variety of Dutch that would help shape Afrikaans), however, the dictionary will validate it as a language in its own right.
“When people think about Kaaps, they often think about it as ‘mixed’ or ‘impure’ (‘onsuiwer’). This relates to the ways in which they think about ‘racial’ identity. They often think about coloured identity as ‘mixed’, which implies that black and white identities are ‘pure’ and bounded that they only become ‘mixed’ in ‘inter-racial’ sexual encounters. This mode of thinking is biologically essentialist,” Haupt maintains.
Meanwhile, dictionary will also have an impact on educational institutions and will be useful to journalists, publishers and editors who are keen to learn more about how to engage with Kaaps speakers.
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Picture: Cape {town}etc gallery