The First International Conference on Linguistics in Southern Africa was held at the University of Cape Town on January 11–14, 2000, and was hosted by the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa in conjunction with UCT's Department of Linguistics and Southern African Languages. The conference was a milestone in that it represented the Society's first international meeting, bringing to Cape Town scholars from Africa, Europe, and North America, and presenting a wide range of scholarship in theoretical, applied, and areal linguistics. Its enormous success was due in no small measure to the tireless efforts of its convenor, Professor Rajend Mesthrie. And if I may add a personal observation, it was a scholarly event that I could never have envisioned when I first traveled to South Africa in October of 1982.

Bien loin que l'objet précède le point de vue, on dirait que c'est le point de vue qui crée l'objet (Ferdinand de Saussure 1916:23).

Traditionally, historiographers of Afrikaans have argued that a relatively uniform (spoken) vernacular existed at the Cape from the late eighteenth century, where it constituted the L(ow) variety in a diglossic situation (see Raidt 1991). Standardization of Afrikaans has been described accordingly in a “naturalistic” fashion as the codification and elaboration of this preexistent vernacular. This paper summarizes the results of a variationist study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century documents that shows the traditional view to be seriously flawed. While “Cape Dutch Vernacular” (or “Afrikaans,” as it came to be called) was a well-defined entity in the popular consciousness from the mid-nineteenth century, the actual patterns of language use in the historical texts indicate the existence of a complex social dialect continuum until the early twentieth century. Variation patterns described for the late eighteenth century are shown still to be productive around 1900. Linguistic standardization, understood as the reduction of variation and the emergence of a linguistic norm, was rapid and strongly marked by cultural and political nationalism.* I should like to thank Roger Lass and Paul Roberge for many stimulating discussions about Afrikaans historical linguistics and for their comments on earlier versions of the work presented in this article. The responsibility for any mistakes remains of course my own.

This article compares the social and linguistic factors present in the development of three languages (Afrikaans, African American Vernacular English, and Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese), demonstrating that the balance of native and nonnative speakers of their source languages during their early formation led to semicreoles retaining a substantial amount of the source languages' morphosyntax, but also a significant number of substrate and interlanguage structural features. The article concludes with the proposal of a formal theoretical model identifying the linguistic processes that lead to partial restructuring, showing how the insights gained in the study of one semicreole can cast light in understanding the diachronic development and synchronic structure of another.* I would like to thank the Linguistic Society of Southern Africa for providing a travel grant that enabled me to attend the First International Conference on Linguistics in Southern Africa, held at the University of Cape Town, January 12–14, 2000, where I presented an earlier version of this article. I would also like to thank Paul Roberge for his helpful comments on this paper. Responsibility for any errors, however, remains solely my own.

The study of adjectival inflection in Afrikaans provides evidence against the supposition that deflection is a necessary consequence of creolization. In particular, the expected outcome did not materialize in Cape Vernacular Afrikaans, a nonstandard variety that was exposed to creolization conditions substantially more than the standard variety. The analysis presented here is a refutation of rather simplistic characterizations of language varieties by means of checklists of linguistic features.