Volume 2019, Issue 258 - Special Issue: Language in the mines, Issue Editors: Leonie Cornips and Pieter Muysken

Fanakalo pidgin rose to prominence when it was selected for use as the lingua franca of the highly multilingual mines of South Africa. This article examines the properties of Fanakalo as a mining language, in contrast to its uses on farms, suburban households and in urban employment. Fanakalo has evolved a special register of technical terms pertaining to the mining industry from various sources (chiefly Zulu, English and Afrikaans). This article characterizes lexical innovations in this mining register and corrects previous estimates of the sources of innovation by differentiating the major parts of speech. The article also draws attention to the complexity of Fanakalo in pamphlets put out by mining management, in sharp contrast to the more usual kind of Fanakalo documented in earlier sources. As far as mining language policy is concerned, there have been calls in the last few decades to discontinue its use on the mines on the grounds of its associations with colonial and racial domination. Whereas Fanakalo has been invariably denigrated by intellectuals as a language of oppression rather than culture, there have been some surprising recent developments. In the wake of the tragedy at Marikana mines in 2012, where 34 workers on strike were shot and killed by police, Fanakalo has come to prominence as the language preferred by the strikers for mass meetings and negotiations with management. This process offers possibilities of the linguistic elaboration of the pidgin and raises questions about possible creolization.

This article compares sociolinguistic and structural outcomes of language contact processes in two mining areas on two different continents, namely the Katanga region in the southeast of what is now the DR Congo, Africa and Heerlen as centre of the former Eastern Mine District in the southeastern province of Limburg in the Netherlands, Europe. Several similarities between these two regions make this comparison interesting. Both in Katanga and Heerlen, the natural copper and coal resources were located in border regions that were peripheral to central seats of government. In both regions, the exploitation of these resources, the growth of mining industries and rapid urbanization, began in the same period, the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Despite being located on different continents – Africa and Europe – similar social conditions of language contact were responsible for the genesis of the language varieties underground and above ground. The language contact situations in Limburg and Katanga both resulted in structural innovation of Dutch and Swahili respectively. The most interesting innovation we identify in both cases can be characterized as the regularization of grammatical properties, and the expansion of aspect marking.

This article investigates grammatical features of Cité Duits , a moribund in-group coalminers’ language spoken in the town of Eisden in Belgian Limburg. Based on audio data from eight multilingual speakers collected through a method of sociolinguistic interviews in 2015, I show that certain features are a fusion of Belgian Dutch, German and the Maaslands dialect spoken in this area, in addition to ‘well-known’ and ‘new’ features. Since grammatical properties of this contact variety have hardly been researched yet, this contribution aims at filling this gap by providing a first analysis of selected morphosyntactic features including negation, bare NPs, non-inverted V3s and participle formation. Building on Aboh’s hybridity approach to the emergence of grammar (2017), I suggest that Cité Duits displays a recombination of linguistic features that have become part of a stable system over the decades. The basic idea is that speakers are capable of weaving together abstract properties of different varieties present in the input. Research on this mining language is therefore an extraordinary opportunity to investigate language and dialect contact, largely because of its recent emergence and direct information about the first generation of speakers and their social ties.

This article explores the linguistic and meta-linguistic heritage of the Italian mine workers families that arrived in Belgian Limburg after the Second World War. On the basis of historical research, discourse analysis of texts and sociolinguistic interviews, I describe how the complex linguistic integration of first-generation migrants, that was scarcely noticed and debated until the 1960s, has been picked up and enregistered by second- and third-generation Italians in Limburg. I show how first generation’s hybrid linguistic practices have come to be linked to one particular mining city, the city of Genk, and enregistered as an urban vernacular of this place, although they still refer to the larger historical background they are rooted in. I explain this heritage in three steps. First, I describe the complex contact-linguistic situation of first-generation miners’ families. I will then present the linguistic consequences of this situation, by describing the emergence of a multilingual, but mainly French-based mining jargon among Flemish and foreign miners. In a third step, I place the social and linguistic situation of first-generation miners at the root of the linguistic practices of second- and third-generation Italians in Limburg.

Using the methodology of historical sociolinguistics, this article explores multilingualism and language contact in the mines of Potosí (Bolivia) in the colonial period. Potosí was the destination of massive migration during its economic heydays around 1610 and one of the largest cities in the Western hemisphere at the time. In the mines special codes were developed, with a specialized lexicon that contains words from different languages. This lexicon was so different that the first vocabulary of the mining language was written in 1610, and many have followed from that date onward. Quechua most probably played a key role as intermediary language between two forms of speaking: the indigenous mining language of the free workers, yanaconas and mingas , probably a mix of Spanish and Quechua, and the language of the forced workers, mitayos , possibly a mix of Aymara and Quechua. The similarities between Aymara and Quechua must have contributed to this possibility of an intermediary language.

This article focuses on the analysis of a specific vocabulary, possibly the remains of a mining language spoken by descendants of Africans. It analyzes 149 lexical items that were registered in the 1920s in a rural region of Minas Gerais, near the city of Diamantina. Based on earlier historical and linguistic studies, as well as on dictionaries of relevant African languages, the lexical study aims to analyze 149 words and expressions in order to verify the etymologies, and determine whether they fit the demographic data available on the origins of the slave population in this area. The second aim is to analyze the distribution of the lexical items in different semantic domains and word classes and compare the observed tendencies, as well as other linguistic characteristics and social functions, with other mining languages and/or similar Afro-Brazilian and Afro-European varieties. The results indicate that Umbundu maintained a high status in the area, and that this variety was not limited to mining activities, but was probably used in everyday life as a secret code that was part of the strategies of resistance among slaves.