A Language Redeemed
A lot of—maybe most—people used to think of Afrikaans as the language of Apartheid. Perhaps some still do . There's nothing about the language that makes it inherently evil, obviously. It, like English, is simply a West Germanic language with lots of borrowing from outside. Despite all the borrowing, however, it and the Dutch language are still mutually intelligible... and few people think of Dutch as a language of oppression, even though both Dutch and Afrikaans sound quite guttural to English-speaking ears. So a language whose vocabulary has been utilized to enforce brutality can also be used to express feelings such as love and tenderness. And if a language can be used to separate people according to ethnicity, it can also be used to unite people of different backgrounds. So please watch this video of South Africa's Stellenbosch University Choir—unable to rehearse or
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