INTRODUCTION AND HISTORY

Flaaitaal, or Tsotsitaal, is a South African township argot which is used mainly, but not exclusively, by black males in various urban centres. It is a mixed code in so far as it seems to have been initially reliant on Afrikaans for structure and a variety of languages for its lexis. To the uninitiated ear, Flaaitaal might sound like a variety of Afrikaans; but such a conclusion would overlook its robust Bantu language texture. Although ‘Tsotsitaal’ is a well-known term, in this chapter I will use the term ‘Flaaitaal’, which is a more commonly used name.

THE ORIGINS OF FLAAITAAL

Flaaitaal probably owes its origins to language contact within a multilingual setting in nineteenth-century South Africa and to the rise of the urban and township communities. In the latter half of the nineteenth century with the discovery of minerals in the South African interior people from all over the world, as well as from parts of South Africa, flocked to these diggings: Europeans speaking English, French, German, Dutch or Yiddish and Africans speaking Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho and Tswana, to name a few. Although this era preceded the evolution of Flaaitaal, it might well have sparked the initial yet crude substratum for its later emergence. An example of informal Afrikaans used by Bantu-language speakers is mentioned by M. S. Evans in a 1916 publication cited by Reinecke et al. (1975).