Despite being one of the oldest languages in South Africa, Kaaps has not received much recognition beyond stigmatisation. This year, the first Kaaps dictionary, titled the Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps, was launched. The dictionary aims to help eradicate the stigmatisation of Kaaps and to eventually help to get Kaaps recognised as a standardised language of education in South Africa.
Kaaps is a language created in settler-colonial South Africa, possibly even predating Kaaps-Hollands. However, the first-ever project to produce a Kaaps dictionary — the Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps (TDK) — was only launched this year, on 26 July.
This is according to Dr Quentin Williams, the managing editor of the TDK and the editor of the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape (UWC).
Dr Quentin Williams, the managing editor of the first Kaaps dictionary, the Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps. PHOTO: Sourced/Brenton Geach
“[Kaaps] is a language mostly created in the settler colonial context of the country. [It] was shaped further during an intense period of language contact and spread between the Khoi and San, the enslaved, Malay, and South-East Asian, Dutch, Portuguese and English speakers,” Williams says.
Kaaps has since changed and developed as a language and has also been associated with a specific group of people.
“Kaaps is the Afrikaans dialect spoken in the [Western] Cape, particularly within the Cape Flats, by black or coloured speakers of Afrikaans,” says Dylan Valley, award-winning documentary filmmaker for Afrikaaps and current lecturer at the film and media department at the University of Cape Town.
The poster for Dylan Valley’s documentary, AfriKaaps, which he has won several local awards as well as two international awards for. PHOTO: Sourced/Dylan Valley
The history of Kaaps-stad
Kaaps has, historically, been stigmatised, which has led to many Kaaps speakers somewhat abandoning their language, according to Dr Gerda Odendaal, co-editor of Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (WAT).
“For a long time, there has been this view of Kaaps as being a kombuistaal or a skollietaal,” Odendaal says.
The stigmatisation of Kaaps is racialised and intended to eradicate and replace the history of Afrikaans’ first speakers, according to Odendaal.
“This image of Kaaps was created during Apartheid, as white speakers of Afrikaans wanted to create the impression that Afrikaans was a European language – a so-called “white man’s language” – in the process denying the contribution that slaves and indigenous peoples made to the genesis of Afrikaans,” says Odendaal.
Dr Gerda Odendaal explains the beauty in Kaaps and shares a few of her favourite Kaaps words.
“Kaaps was thus not seen as an integral part of Afrikaans, but rather dismissed as a ‘distorted’ form of Afrikaans. Mother-tongue speakers of Kaaps were told to praat reg at school and were taught Standard Afrikaans,” Odendaal adds.
Challenging the status quo
The TDK is a stepping stone in a larger goal to see Kaaps become standardised and used as a language of education, according to Williams.
“This project [the TDK] is significant because it will have a profound impact on the consideration of Kaaps as a language of teaching and learning at school and university, as a language for literacy development, and a language that will be learned by non-Kaaps speakers in South Africa and across the world,” Williams says.
There is currently one focus module — in the Department of Afrikaans-Nederlands — at UWC which focuses on Kaaps, according to professor Charlyn Dyers, the co-author of Kaaps in Fokus.
Kaaps in Fokus is the first academic collection of chapters focused solely on this variety of Afrikaans, says Dyers.
Kaaps in Fokus and other books which emphasise Kaaps, such as the TDK, are important for South Africans in celebrating their diversity, according to Dyers. “These publications and others help to highlight not only the variety, but the speakers themselves – their linguistic identities, their pain, their authentic forms of expression,” she says.
A seat at the table
Kaaps speakers are starting to find their voice again, according to Odendaal.
“In recent years, however, I see speakers of Kaaps increasingly reclaiming their Kaaps identity and thus using Kaaps more in spheres of society where they used English before,” she says.
A younger generation of non-Kaaps speakers are also starting to rid themselves of the stigmas attached to Kaaps, Odendaal says.
“I see these children, who mostly speak English, slowly gravitating toward Kaaps as an identity marker; meaning that, although a lot of them do not speak Kaaps themselves, they do embrace the Kaaps culture more readily than their parents,” Odendaal says.
This is partly due to the progressive way in which Kaaps speakers are presented and displayed in mainstream media recently, according to Valley.
The featured artists in AfriKaaps from left to right: Moenier Adams, Jitsvinger, Shane Cooper, Bliksemstraal, Kyle Shephard, Blaq Pearl, Emile YX?. PHOTO: Sourced/Dylan Valley
“I look at the representations on shows like Suidooster and movies like Barakat and they show people speaking Kaaps in nuanced ways. Before this, you’d only see a person speaking Kaaps if they were a gangster or a criminal,” Valley says.
Seeing Kaaps speakers in mainstream media shown in refined and diverse roles impacts future generations of Kaaps speakers positively, according to Valley. “These kinds of representations tend to stick and can have a real impact on people’s lives and abilities to move throughout the world,” he says.
The solution to Kaaps speakers being seen as more than a criminal or a punchline in series and movies is to “hire people who speak Kaaps and are from the communities [they] are representing, and give them creative autonomy”, according to Valley.
Punchlines and criminals
‘Stereotypical’ roles written in Kaaps and for Kaaps speakers can still be executed with nuance when written by someone who has an intimate knowledge of Kaaps. Mia Arderne, who grew up in the northern suburbs of Cape Town, published her debut novel, Mermaid Fillet, last year. “It’s my language. I grew up with it…my family, my friends, my school, my neighbourhood. My self-talk is in Kaaps,” says Ardene.
The characters in the novel speak in a vernacular Kaaps speech and these words are written as such. “With Mermaid Fillet, I wrote like I think, and like my characters think, in a deeply familiar dialect – our dialect,” Arderne says.
“It’s my language. I grew up with it…my family, my friends, my school, my neighbourhood. My self-talk is in Kaaps,” Author Mia Arderne speaks on why it was important for her to write Mermaid Fillet using Kaaps. PHOTO: Keanan Hemmonsbey
Arderne explains the value of using her native language as a tool to stay true to herself and the authenticity of her writing.
“I could use words that explained in one short phrase what would otherwise take me two paragraphs to describe,” says Arderne. “It’s incredibly satisfying to say precisely what you mean to say. To type ‘Are you all-the-way jas?’ and not need to explain yourself further.”
As much as Kaaps has recently begun to make its way into the academic sphere, Arderne maintains her affection for the less subtle elements of Kaaps. “Our swear words are elite. So are our terms of endearment,” she says. “I find warmth and home in it. My means of expression and way of thinking has always been informed by Kaaps.”