From Kitaab-Hollandsch to Kitaab-Afrikaans: The evolution of a non-White literary variety at the Cape (1856-1940)

The first significant appearance of Cape Dutch/Afrikaans as a literary medium has been situated in the satirical dialogues published in the journalist Meurants Cradocksch Nieuwsblad from 1860 onwards. In the context of the White and Christian-dominated Afrikaans language movements, and afterwards of Apartheid, little attention has been paid to the evidence of an older Cape Dutch/Afrikaans literary tradition cultivated among Muslim Cape Coloureds, often referred to as Cape Malays. Descending mainly from the Asian slaves brought by the VOC, the Cape Malays have from an early stage developed a distinct religious culture through their cultivation of Islam, as well as a distinct linguistic identity through their connexions with the Dutch East Indies and the Islamic world. Those cultural idiosyncrasies resulted in a relatively late nativization of Cape Dutch as well as the appearance in the early 19th century of a local Muslim literature, using as a linguistic medium a distinct religious variety of Cape Dutch/Afrikaans. That variety was among other things known as Kitaab-Hollandsch, a term which stressed its vernacular identity, as well as its literary and religious character. Reflecting its specificity, that variety was initially using only the Arabic alphabet until knowledge of the Roman alphabet started to spread among the Cape Malay intelligentsia in the late part of the 19th century. The use of that variety, in both its Arabic and Roman forms, seems to have endured up until the mid 20th century.
Due to the particular socio-cultural settings in which it evolved, Kitaab-Hollandsch/Afrikaans can offer an interesting outlook on the process of standardization of the non-White varieties of Cape Dutch/Afrikaans. In the absence of a thorough diachronic survey, we have compiled a range of Cape Malay Afrikaans religious texts covering roughly one century from the mid 19th up to the mid 20th century, i.e. that period which saw the gradual transition from Dutch to Afrikaans as official norm.
This article presents the socio-historical and linguistic context of Muslim Cape Dutch/Afrikaans literature using the same text as in a previous article (Stell et al. 2007). It then focuses on the areas of greatest diachronic variation in the phonology, lexicon, idiomaticity, morphology and syntax of our Cape Malay texts. It then attempts to place that variation within the perspective of the evolution of Cape Dutch/Afrikaans.