2018/11/09 by Ana Deumert · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Computer science #Epistemology #Gender Studies in Language #German #History #Ideology #Jargon #Law #Linguistic Education and Pedagogy #Linguistics #Multilingual Education and Policy #Narrative #Philosophy #Political science #Politics #Scripting language #Sociology
paper · doi:10.1075/le.18006.deu
openalex publication_date 2018/11/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/07
Abstract In this article I explore a particular set of contact varieties that emerged in Namibia, a former German colony. Historical evidence comes from the genre of autobiographic narratives that were written by German settler women. These texts provide – ideologically filtered – descriptions of domestic life in the colony and contain observations about everyday communication practices. In interpreting the data I draw on the idea of ‘jargon’ as developed within creolistics as well as on Chabani Manganyi’s (1970) comments on the ‘master-servant communication complex’, and Beatriz Lorente’s (2017) work on ‘scripts of servitude’. I suggest that to interpret the historical record is a complex hermeneutic endeavour: on the one hand, the examples given are likely to tell us ‘something’ about communication in the colony; on the other hand, the very description of communicative interactions is rooted in what I call a ‘script of supremacy’, which is quite unlike the ‘atonement politics’ ( McIntosh 2014 ) of postcolonial language learning.