The slaves languages in the Dutch Cape Colony and Afrikaans vir

Abstract

The Afrikaans preposition vir (< Dutch voor for', is an optional case marker in animate direct objects and in nominal indirect objects, and it is a preposition in recipient and beneficiary indirect object PPs. This un-Dutch feature of Afrikaans is commonly attibuted to influences from Asian Creole Portuguese, which must be narrowed down to Indo-Portuguese in particular. Since there were also many slaves from Indonesia in the Cape Colony, and since Pasar Malay marks animate DOs and IOs with sama with', one might expect to find an alternative object marker met 'with' in (some variety of) Afrikaans. However, this hypothetical met does not exist. This can be explained if we take into account that the majority of the Indonesian slaves came from the eastern parts of the archipelago, while the scarce remnants of South African Malay demonstrate some Eastern Malay characteristics. Object marking in most Eastern Malay dialects happens to agree with object marking in Afrikaans and Indo-Portuguese.