"My fokofpolisiekar CD?" I repeat, bemusedly. "That's not the kind of CD teachers typically want to borrow..."
Eyeballs roll dramatically. "She's an _Afrikaans_ teacher!"
Right. I'd forgotten. Afrikaans teachers are, as a breed, cool. Their begripstoetse are about road rage, their opstelle about social problems, their briefopdragte Dear John letters. Instead of Totius, they analyse Brasse vannie Kaap and Kobus!, and their cultural reference point is Corne en Twakkie.
Afrikaans, they all agree, is cool. Unlike Xhosa, which they shed after Class 10, which embarrassed the home language Xhosa speakers with its reification of "traditional" culture, its dressing up for orals, its focus on rural life. Urban kids feel as close to life in Cala as they do to life on Mars. Despite Tom Cruise to put them off the latter.
Unlike English, too. Unable to shed English, they continue to suffer under Departmentally Approved setworks, deconstruction of advertisements, formal grammar of an ossified language no one speaks any longer. In fact, rather like the way we were taught Afrikaans at school (except without the phonetics...)
Different generation, different baggage. There goes another comfortable hypothesis, blown out of the water by the data....