Page 24 - 7-Windhoek MORNING SESSION e-BOOK (27 April 2023)

School of Humanities, Society and Development
FACULTY OF EDUCATION &
HUMAN SCIENCES

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN ENGLISH STUDIES

CANDIDATE: NAFUKA Festus I

CANDIDATE’S DISSERTATION
A STRUCTURALIST LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF
LANGUAGE CONTACT IN NYATHI’S TEARS OF
FEAR IN THE ERROR OF TERROR, PHILANDER’S
KING OF THE DUMP, HANGULA’S THE SHOW ISN’T
OVER UNTIL AND MOLAPONG’S THE HORIZON IS CALLING

The doctoral study was undertaken and completed under the
supervision of Prof. Collen Sabao of the University of Namibia as Main-
Supervisor and Prof. Haileleul Zeleke Woldermariam from the Namibia
University of Science and Technology as Co-Supervisor.
The candidate examined the manners in which playwrights from
different cultural and linguistic backgrounds do not use and
accommodate the same language structures and/or live in daily
contact without being mutually affected. The candidate thus observes
that, the language of Namibian plays as used has been influenced by
contact with indigenous languages and Afrikaans, resulting in varying
degrees of transfer of features from the indigenous languages and
Afrikaans and the creation of new patterns and structures that are
often different from those in Standard English. As part of the major
findings, the study observed that language contact-induced changes
such grammaticalisation, language interferences, Namlish and the
language of Namibian plays were all proliferate in the selected plays.
Language contact thus, the candidate observes, has an impact on
the language of the selected Namibian plays in English, resulting in
language interferences, language shifts, pidgins and creoles, lexical
borrowing, code-switching, and code-mixing. Language contact
between indigenous Namibian languages with Afrikaans and English
produces new pronunciations, grammatical structures, vocabulary,
meaning, phonology, style, syntactic shift, and morphology.

The candidate concludes that there is evidence that, through
language convergence and divergence, language contact has
shaped and influenced the nature and structure of the language of
Namibian plays.

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