South Africa
South African English is a robust, distinctive variety of global English with a marked range of registers and idioms. Its unique feature is that the strongest terms of swearing, racist insult, and foul language are borrowed from other local languages, principally Afrikaans. This is not the case in other global varieties of English. Furthermore, given the country’s history of conflict and racial separation, formalized in the policy of apartheid officially implemented from 1948 to about 1990, it is natural that the variety should have a regrettably large stock of terms of ethnic insult. Of these, the native terms kaffir and hottentot and the borrowed terms coolie and coon have their own entries.
The founding population of English-speaking immigrants, still known as the 1820 Settlers, were selected by the British government and encouraged to settle in an area of the Eastern Cape Province, then known as Caffraria. (Most of the Western Cape Province had been in the hands of the Dutch colonists from 1652.) The four thousand settlers who landed at Algoa Bay from April 10, 1820, were people of education and some means: farmers, bourgeois artisans, traders, and businessmen from various parts of the British Isles. There was a considerable Methodist element among them: by 1844 five of the ten churches built in the area called Albany were of that sober denomination. They were thus very different in character and motivation from both the Pilgrim Fathers of Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts and the Founding Convicts of Botany Bay in Australia. These various factors perhaps explain why the early records of the settlers show no signs of the swearing and foul language that were the hallmark of Australian English from the arrival of the first convicts in 1788.
However, modern South African English has acquired a wealth of excretory, genital, and racial epithets, many of them confined to oral usage and derived from Afrikaans. Originating in the language of the Dutch colonists, Afrikaans is now more widely used as a home language than English, and has a wide social stratification. There is also a corresponding range of acceptability, from generally used slang terms to the most seriously taboo. As V. de Klerk notes, “SAE [South African English] slang is largely from Afrikaans; sometimes the meanings are borrowed in full, sometimes they shift” (in Mesthrie, ed., 1995, 271). In his fictional memoir Boyhood , the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, brought up in an English speaking family, observes: “The language of the Afrikaans boys was filthy beyond belief” (1997, 57).
Among the more common slang terms, that for “shit,” namely kak , is widely used in both its literal senses and the metaphorical extensions of “rubbish,” “nonsense,” and “worthless,” largely corresponding to American English crap or crappy . (Incidentally, poppycock is actually derived from the related Dutch word pappakak , literally “soft shit.”) Other fairly mild personal insults are drol , meaning “turd,” poep meaning “fart,” and its compound variant poephol , meaning “arsehole.” Marginally less common is gat in the sense of “arsehole” and its various picturesque compounds, namely gat-kruiper , “arsecreeper” or “brown-nose” (also found in the bilingual form gat-creeper ), and gatvol , meaning “fed up,” “disgusted.”
At the taboo end of the scale are two terms for “cunt,” namely poes and doos . The first term is anatomical, the equivalent and relative of “pussy,” alluded to in 1884 by a visiting Dutch professor, Nicolaas Mansvelt, who noted amusingly that “the new arrival from Holland takes a risk if he addresses a cat.” The second meaning, literally a “box” or “chest,” has the parallel metaphor in French boîte and is highly insulting. Fokken (“fucking”) has also been borrowed, but lacks the broad currency of the English equivalent, although it features in the grievous insult dubbel fokken poes!
Certainly the most powerful, complex, and protean term is moer , meaning variously “mother” or “womb.” Its most concentrated form jou moer is explained by the Dictionary of South African English (DSAE , 1996) as “an obscene and abusive mode of address, equivalent to ‘stuff you’; an expletive expressing rage, disappointment, or contradiction.” The dramatist Athol Fugard, in the glossary to Boesman and Lena (1973), designated the phrase as “the ultimate obscenity; contraction of You ma se moer , Your mother’s womb.” Interestingly, it was an outsider, Eric Partridge, who first recorded the use in his Dictionary of the Underworld (1950), noting that moer is “a word used only in the worst of company.” It is also used as a plain intensive, in the moer in “the hell in” and a moer of a …" a hell of a “…”
In the religious domain there are common Afrikaans equivalents for “Lord!,” namely Here! , and for “Jesus!,” namely Jissus! or Yissus! or jislaik! , as well as for “damned,” namely verdomde . The curious asseveration ‘struesgod and its euphemized version ’struesbob , derive from “as true as God.” The exclamation God! is also common, pronounced in its guttural Afrikaans fashion. Bliksem , meaning “lightning,” can be used as a straight expletive of annoyance or frustration as bliksem! , as an emotive epithet as in “the bliksem car!,” or as a term of personal abuse, equivalent of “bastard” or “swine”: “I’m sure that bliksem stole the money.”
A common personal expletive is voetsak! also spelt voetsek! a highly contemptuous equivalent of “get lost!,” traditionally used only of inferiors or dogs, as seen in this early instance from 1837: “Dogs attacked us as we approached; but on the cry of ‘voortzuk’ from the master, followed by a stone, they left us” (Sir James Edward Alexander, Narrative of a Campaign in Kaffir-land 1837). The Afrikaans term is voertsek , derived from the Dutch voort seg ik , “away say I.” It is now assimilated as a verb: “I told the beggar to voetsek.” Powerful expressions of disgust are found in sies! and siestog!
Most of these terms are commonly used informally by English-speaking South Africans, few of whom would use all the English equivalents. By contrast, there is a comparative paucity of English swearwords borrowed into Afrikaans. The major instance are blerrie (from “bloody”) and boggerall (a loan-translation of bugger-all ), but significantly, none of the major four-letter words have crossed the linguistic barrier as they have in Pidgin English. This dependence on Afrikaans perhaps explains why there is no recognized “great South African swearword” that has passed into the mainstream of world English.
Among South African writers the noted dramatist Athol Fugard employs highly demotic language in his plays, exemplifying the typical use of Afrikaans equivalents of taboo English terms. In Boesman and Lena (1969), depicting the miserable life of two Coloured vagrants, the dialogue is in broad South African English, and is a virtual compendium of integrated Afrikaans swearwords and expletives. Although bloody and bastard are used frequently, they are outnumbered by some twenty Afrikaans terms of various force, which are set in italics and provide numerous first printed instances. Interestingly, Fugard found it necessary to add a glossary of over 160 items to the 1973 edition, since the play had reached audiences unfamiliar with its dialect.
The traditional animosity between the British and the Boers, deriving from colonialism, competition for resources, and bitter warfare, has its semantic correlatives in many insulting terms. Among these are hairyback, rockspider, crunchie, soutpiel (“salt penis”), and plain Dutchman , which can be humorous or laden with contempt. All of these are recent coinages, recorded only as far back as 1973, although the Oxford English Dictionary records Dutchy from 1837. Among terms borrowed from Afrikaans are jaap or japie (derived from the name Jacob), plaasjaap and gawie (“bumpkin”), and takhaar (“unkempt,” “disheveled”). All denote or imply a boorish or backwoodsman stereotype, distortions of the traditional role of the Boer as farmer and trekker into the wilderness. Among Afrikaners it is a severe insult to call someone “a real jaap.”
Boer , originally a historical term denoting the early Dutch colonists at the Cape, broadened to mean an Afrikaner, but with an emotive overtones, positive during the period of the struggle for survival against the British in the Boer War (1899–1902), but negative during the phase of Afrikaner political dominance after 1948. As the policy of apartheid was enforced, the derogatory use became particularly prominent among the Black population. Ezekiel Mphahlele recalls in his memoir, Down Second Avenue (1959): “Two Whites on a motorcycle … came straight at us and we jumped on the pavement. ‘Voetsek, you Boers!’ I shouted impulsively. They turned back” (127). It is still used generally of those in institutions of power, such as policemen and prison warders, who under apartheid were predominantly Afrikaners.
The principal terms for the British were born out of the hostilities resulting in the Boer War. The first and most enduring word was rooinek , literally a “red neck,” meaning one sunburnt from the unfamiliar hot climate, recorded from 1891; it did not imply a lack of culture as redneck does in American English. With increasing rapprochement the term has lost much of its original animosity, and though still current, often has a tinge of irony. More explicit was khaki , from the color of the British uniforms, achieving wide currency from 1900 in quotations like “It was a happy time-away from the khaki, far from the roar of the cannon” (1902, cited in DSAE 1996).
Three terms describing minor criminals or villains are skelm, skolly , and tsotsi . The first entered Afrikaans from Dutch schelm , “a rogue,” also borrowed into British English and Scots as skellum , which renders the current pronunciation. The second comes from Dutch scholje , “a rascal,” now more a street hoodlum. Tsotsi denotes a black street thug, invariably flashily dressed, from Nguni tsotsa , to dress in an exaggerated style. In common with underground gangs, they have their own argot, called tsotsi-taal , “gangster speech.”
The racial divisions of apartheid left obvious semantic correlatives. Insults across the color line are very numerous, ranging from the most notorious and wounding, like kaffir and hottentot (which have their own entries), munt (from umuntu , the Bantu word for a person), houtkop (Afrikaans for “wooden head”) to the comparatively mild and humorous, such as darky . This was first used to refer to a black in a patronizing fashion in the southern United States before being taken into British English. In recent decades it has been appropriated or reclaimed by South African blacks, often used ironically, as in: “We darkies are proud of our tribal heritage.” There is even a football team called Dangerous Darkies.
Other insulting terms for “non-white” peoples as they were classified under apartheid have higher currency in Afrikaans, including bruinmens (“brown people”), klonkie , and kleurling for a Coloured person. Also current in both Afrikaans and English is coolie for an Indian, initially borrowed to denote a porter or bearer—for example, a wharf coolie or fish coolie , a generic use recorded from about 1827. This highly derogatory term has its own entry.
A paradoxical survival in this racially charged atmosphere is coon , which has its own entry. Although occasionally used in the insulting American English fashion of a black person, coon has been reclaimed to refer to the Coon Carnival , a New Year celebration held in Cape Town by choirs and bands of Coloured people, “so named from the black and white raccoon-style make-up [worn by the participants] similar to that of Negro Christie Minstrels” (Branford, ed., 1978). A similar survival is nigger-ball , a sweet, which until recently had a general currency; it was not regarded as offensive, since nigger was not commonly used in South Africa.
The term Coloured has also changed in semantic force. It was used as a plain descriptive term from the 1830s, becoming an official category in the Population Registration Act of 1950 designating “a person who is not a white person or a native.” Often regarded as an embarrassment, it was replaced by “of mixed race,” similar to the euphemistic use of colored for black in American English. However, it is also increasingly reclaimed by the population itself: A survey carried out by the Johannesburg newspaper The Star in 1994 found that 75 percent of those polled “did not mind being referred to as Coloured” (October 15-16, 9). It is once more the standard term.
Descriptions of South African English have shown increasing sensitivity to ethnic insults. The earliest glossary, the Reverend Charles Pettman’s comprehensive Afrikanderisms: A Glossary of South African Words and Phrases (1913), covered terms like kaffir with great precision, but focused on the historical uses and ignored slang. Most of the terms discussed above were accommodated lexicographically in the various editions of A Dictionary of South African English (ed. J. Branford) issued from 1978 onward. However, the major Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (ed. P. Silva et al. 1996) did not include several. Recognition of the power of these terms of ethnic insult is reflected in the legal category in South African law of crimen injuria, which has its own entry.
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