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Department of Germanic Languages
University of North Carolina
438 Dey Hall, CB# 3160
Chapel Hill NC 27599
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I
did my graduate work at the University of Michigan,
where I majored in both Germanic and general linguistics.
I received MA degrees in 1973 (Germanic languages) and
1975 (linguistics), and the PhD in 1980. My first faculty
appointment was at Princeton University (1980-85, visitor
in 1988), where my duties were divided between the Department
of Germanic Languages & Literatures there and the
Program in Linguistics. Since my appointment to the
faculty of the University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill in 1985, I have offered a wide variety of courses
and seminars on the history of German, older Germanic
dialects, the structure of German (now taught very capably
by Professor Gert Webelhuth, a member of UNC-CH's Department
of Linguistics), pidgins and creoles, sociolinguistics,
the Afrikaans language, and South African literature.
A not insignificant portion of my work here has been
editorial. Since 1985 I have served as editor of the
University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic
Languages and Literatures. I currently edit the American
Journal of Germanic Linguistics, a refereed semiannual
publication of the Society for Germanic Philology. Editorial
work is not something that everyone would rush to get,
for it can be a thankless and time-consuming task. (And,
as another fading editor wrote: You make many more enemies
than friends). Nevertheless, it has had its rewards,
not the least of which has been the ability to keep
abreast of scholarly work being done in both the literary
and linguistic arenas of our discipline, and the opportunity
to work with some truly outstanding scholars.
As concerns my own research: My dissertation and early
published work involved the diachronic phonology in
older Germanic languages and in Sanskrit, as also the
theoretical issues attendant to the role of morphosyntax
in the course of phonological change. While still in
graduate school, my interest had been drawn to the transformations
of metropolitan Germanic dialects that have been exported
to foreign soil and have undergone intensive contact
with other languages. This interest harks back to my
study of Yiddish in 1977-78; and it intensified when
I coedited a miscellany of articles by the great Dutch
Hellenist and creolist, D. C. Hesseling. Hesseling's
writings on the history of Afrikaans - specifically
on how Cape Dutch went to the brink of creolization
only to turn back - led me to read further about this
most fascinating language. In 1982-83 I was awarded
a humanities fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation,
which enabled me to spend several months of research
in South African archives and libraries. This was in
one sense a humbling experience, for it meant my learning
a whole new field; one dabbles at one's peril. Then
too, with the notable exception of Dr. Hans den Besten
(University of Amsterdam), there were virtually no scholars
outside of South Africa who were doing serious work
on the history of Afrikaans.
The thrust of my research program is this: The emergence
of Afrikaans as a new language is as much a social fact
as it is a purely linguistic one. In over a century
of writing on this subject, there have been widely varying
degrees of emphasis on external factors during the Dutch
East India Company era (1652-1795). For the past fifty
years the emphasis has been almost exclusively on the
linguistic side of glottogenesis at the Cape of Good
Hope. This is only right and proper, for we needed to
have the material facts in hand before we could begin
on the matter of sociolinguistic relations. Nevertheless, "the social and linguistic facts about Afrikaans have not been sufficiently studied together, as a package,
to see what conclusion best fits them" (Thomason
and Kaufman 1988:252). In my monograph The Formation
of Afrikaans (1994) I claim that Afrikaans grew out
of close contact between an extraterritorial variety
of Dutch and a robust, stable Cape Dutch Pidgin, without
itself ever having had a "basilectal" creole
stage. In the milieu of the old Cape, Dutch was used
as a medium of interethnic communication within the
substratum, which would provide the requisite crucible
for the emergence of social norms. Cultural convergence
between the three groups primarily responsible for the
formation of Afrikaans - Khoikhoi, Europeans, enslaved
Africans and Asians - brought Euro-Cape Dutch into intimate
contact with the stable Cape Dutch Pidgin. By the end
of the Dutch colonial period, the Netherlandic speech
community at the Cape consisted of a spectrum of lects,
ranging from the 'High' Dutch of the expatriate elite
to a vernacular on which the Cape Dutch Pidgin has left
a strong imprint.
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