This paper provides the first overview of the history, sociolinguistics, and structures of Namibian Kiche Duits (lit. “kitchen German”), which is today a dying contact variety. The analysis draws on archival records, colonial publications, and memoirs, as well as over 120 sociolinguistic interviews conducted in 2000. Early varieties of Namibian Kiche Duits emerged from 1900 under German colonial rule. The language was used primarily for inter-ethnic communication within the work context. However, speakers also “crossed” playfully into Kiche Duits in a number of within-group speech genres (competition games, scolding, banter, etc.), thus appropriating the colonial language—alongside cultural borrowings (Truppenspieler, “traditional” dress)—for new in-group practices. These within-group uses contributed to the linguistic stabilization of the language as well as the formation of new (post-)colonial (neo-African) identities.*

This paper examines the cause of the decline of the preterite tense in favor of the present perfect tense in Early New High German. This development has long been attributed to apocope, which rendered the 3sg. weak preterite suffix -te homophonous with the 3sg. present suffix -t. By analyzing a database of over 20,000 past-tense clauses, this study evaluates the apocope account and more recent hypotheses. The resulting data lead to a new explanation: syncope in the 2sg. and 2pl. of weak verbs yielded dispreferred final clusters (-tst and -tt), resulting in a preference in these contexts for the present perfect, which then spread to other contexts.*