Namibian Black German

Namibian Black German, also NBG, (German: Küchendeutsch, "kitchen German") is a pidgin language of Namibia that derives from standard German.^[1] It is nearly extinct.^[2] It was spoken mostly by Namibians who did not learn standard German during the period of German rule. It was never a first language. It is currently spoken as a second language by people generally over 50 years old, who today usually also speak Standard or Namibian German, Afrikaans, or English.^[3] Along with general learning in the metropolitan environments of Southern Namibia where Namibian German is spoken, NBG may be preserved nominally through parent-to-child or in-house transmission.

Colonial acquisition of German in Namibia often took place outside of formal education and was primarily self-taught. Like many pidgin languages, Namibian Black German developed through limited access to the standard language and was restricted to the work environment.

Currently several hundred thousand Namibians speak German as a second language – many, but not most of them Black, and while Namibian German often does not adhere to standard German, it is not pidgin.^[4]

English and Afrikaans have left an influence on the development of NBG, leading to three primary prepositional patterns:^[5]

• adding a preposition where Standard German would use the accusative
• dropping prepositions which are usually present in Standard German
• changing the preposition that is required by the verb

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Examples of phrases with Standard German equivalents:

• Lange nicht sehen - long no see ("Lange nicht gesehen")
• Was Banane kosten? - How much does the banana cost? ("Was kostet die/eine Banane?")
• spät Uhr - 'late hour', meaning 'it's late' ("es ist spät")
• Herr fahren Jagd, nicht Haus - "Master went hunting and he's not at home" ("Der Herr ist zur Jagd gefahren und ist nicht zu Hause")

• Deumert, A (2003). "Markedness and salience in language contact and second-language acquisition: evidence from a non-canonical contact language". Language Sciences. 25 (6): 561–613. doi:10.1016/S0388-0001(03)00033-0.
• Deumert, A. (2010). Historical Sociolinguistics in a Colonial World, Methodological Considerations [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://hison.sbg.ac.at/content/conferences/handoutsslides2010/Deumert3.pdf
• Deumert, A (2009). "Namibian Kiche Duits: The Making (and Decline) of Neo-African Language". Journal of Germanic Linguistics. 21 (4): 349–417. doi:10.1017/s1470542709990122.
• Langer, N., McLelland, N. (2011). German Studies: Language and Linguistics. The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, 71, 564–594. JSTOR 10.5699/yearworkmodlang.71.2009.0564
• Shah, Sheena (2007). "German in a contact situation: The case of Namibian German" (PDF). EDUSA. 2 (2): 20–44. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-07-13.
• Stolberg, D. (2012). When a standard language goes colonial: Language attitudes, language planning, and destandardization during German colonialism. 25th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, Workshop 2: Foundations of Language Standardization. Retrieved from http://conference.hi.is/scl25/files/2012/06/Stolberg.pdf

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