Missing Afrikaans: 'Linguistic longing' among Afrikaans-speaking immigrants in New Zealand

Abstract

Immigrants arriving in a new country typically have varying ideas about the relative status of their native language and the language of the receiving society, and some have strategies for dealing with maintenance and shift. In all cases there are differences between the immigrants' language experiences in the two countries. This paper reports on a study which investigated what it is that Afrikaans speakers who have immigrated to New Zealand miss about speaking Afrikaans post-immigration; that is, the focus is on the participants' emotional responses to diminished exposure to and opportunities for using Afrikaans and the possible consequences of these circumstances, or what the researchers h..