Heritage Month: Exploring the shared roots of our mother tongues

IN honour of Heritage Month, Caxton Local Media had the privilege to learn from Prof Nogwaja Zulu from the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s College of Humanities, School of Arts, African Languages. Prof Zulu shared insightful perspectives on the rich diversity of South African languages, revealing the fascinating history and shared roots that have shaped our linguistic landscape.

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Prof Zulu writes: 

It is common in South Africa to find a number of words with similar meanings and sounds being used in several languages, for example, one finds common words in English, Afrikaans, isiZulu and other languages. That linguistic process is known as cross-language word usage. Cross-language word usage happens because of the interaction in language contact, that is, when two languages meet for the first time. In Africa, cross-language interaction happened when European languages came into contact with third-world countries during the period of missionaries, of intercontinental trade, such as the Indian-Dutch interaction, and later, on a massive scale during the colonisation period. 

Another process of cross-language word usage happens as a result of language co-existence. In South Africa, African languages have a long history of living together in the southern region of Africa.

As a result of a long co-existence, there has been borrowing and interchange of language items, resulting in cognates – words with the same spelling and meaning in different languages. An example is the word, ‘mona’, for jealousy, which is in Nguni languages such as isiZulu and isiXhosa. But that word is also used in the Sotho language group. Some cognate words are more common in language affinities, such as Nguni (isiZulu, isiXhosa and isiNdebele) and Sotho (Sesotho, Setswana and Sepedi) language groups because of a long co-existence.

Let us examine the following loan words (words from a donor language to a recipient language):

English-isiZulu kitchen words:

porridge – phalishi
spoon – sipuni
dish – ndishi

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pot – bhodo/bhodwe
bottle – bhodlela

These words are for items that came with European missionaries during the first language encounter with Africans. The isiZulu word for spoon is khezo, but that meaning is getting lost to the generation born after 1994. To them, sipuni is the original word for spoon. Many loans seem to be naturalised in recipient languages, such as the Afrikaans word pap being used as papa in Nguni and Sotho language groups. IsiZulu sometimes uses phalishi for porridge, but that meaning has shifted to ‘soft porridge’. Also, the English and Afrikaans words ‘cat’ and kat, are naturalised in Nguni and Sotho language groups as kati and katse, respectively. In isiZulu, a cat is mangobe, and in Sesotho, it is mosiya.

The influence of the various missionary languages is now almost untraceable when it comes to naming items of first language contact, for example in Sotho languages, where the missionaries were from France, the Sesotho word for sweets, dipongpong (singular: pongpong), is no longer recognised as the French load word, bonbon.

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New words

New loan words come with new inventions in technology, and they are Africanized into the morphology (word structure) of various African languages. The word ‘phone’ (verb) – fona is Africanised in all the African languages of South Africa, for example in the following:

Ngizofona in isiZulu
Ke tla fona in Sesotho
Ndizofona in isiXhosa.

We find a similar pattern with the current technology terminology: television, computer, delete, click, save, inbox, etc.

In conclusion, we can say that because of the long history of co-existence among the languages of South Africa, a healthy interaction of the languages of the country exists.

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