2022-2023 L'IMAGE comics
To cite this page: Taniguchi, Ai, and Haili Su. 2023. Iben's Story - Afrikaans. In University of Toronto Language, Identity, Multiculturalism and Global Empowerment Project (L'IMAGE). Available online at https://linguistait.wixsite.com/limage1/iben-afrikaans. Accessed on [date].
Iben's Story - Afrikaans
Content Note: Mention and discussion of the apartheid era in South Africa on p.6-8 of the comic (no details are discussed). In the infographic: mention and discussion of the apartheid era in South Africa in more detail, with mentions of slavery, oppression, and racial discrimination.
L’IMAGE comic series: Iben’s story
Alt-Text with long description
COMIC
Content Note: Mention and discussion of the apartheid era in South Africa on p.6-8 of the comic (no details are discussed). [Page 1, Title Page]
Upper left corner of page reads: UofT L’IMAGE Project: Language, Identity, Multiculturalism and Global Empowerment
Subtitle over light blue box: The lived experiences of real multilingual students at U of T
Title over bright red box: Iben’s story**
Under the title banners, the character Iben smiles at the readers. She is white, light-skinned, slender, and has gloriously curly, coily brunette hair that goes just below her chin. She is wearing a light beige turtleneck sweater, which will be revealed later in the comic to be a color block design sweater that is beige in the top half and black in the bottom half. She is wearing chunky silver hoops earrings.
Bottom left corner of page shows the University of Toronto logo.
Bottom right footnote: **Some stories in the L’IMAGE comic series employ pseudonyms at the request of the featured student.
[Long description of text and images in the comic strip:
The comic strips in the L’IMAGE comic series uses the font Ames, which is the standard font for comics. Ames is an all-caps font. However, Alt-Texts for this project are not written in all-caps so that they will be more accessible for screen readers.
The comic artist for the series is Dr. Ai Taniguchi. Her drawing style can be described as: Japanese manga inspired, cute, large eyes, intentionally sketchy and unpolished line art, simplified, expressive. The comic strips are all digital, but she uses a pen that mimics the line weight of a traditional fountain pen. Her line art is on average 0.5mm in width (relatively thin), but the line weight varies and looks hand-drawn.
The title page of each comic strip is in color. It has a University of Toronto color scheme: navy blue, light blue, and bright red. The background is white with a navy blue frame. The references and acknowledgements page and the “About the L’IMAGE project” page also have this University of Toronto color scheme.
The comic strips themselves are black and white, and employ digital screen tones for shading and backgrounds. Narrations are written inside rectangular boxes, unless otherwise noted.]
[Page 2]
Top panel 1: Iben is smiling with her mouth open, and is waving at the readers with her left hand.
Iben’s narration: Hi! I’m Iben. I’m an international student at U of T.
Top panel 2: A map of mostly Africa with parts of the Middle East is shown. Bodies of water are shaded, and the land is blank and white, except for South Africa which is shaded grey and labeled “South Africa.” South Africa is located at the southern tip of the African continent.
Iben’s narration: I speak Afrikaans and English! I’m from South Africa.
Bottom panel 1: There is a list of languages. Around the list, there are lines of various shades of dots.
Iben’s narration: Did you know that South Africa has 12 official languages?!
Below the narration box, we can see a list of the 12 official languages of South Africa:
Afrikaans
English
Isindebele
Isixhosa
Isizulu
Sepedi
Sesotho
Setswana
Siswati
South African Sign Language
Tshivenda
Xitsonga
Bottom panel 2: Iben is smiling and a hand-written text depicting what she is saying reads, “Igama lami ngingu Iben”.
Iben’s narration: In South Africa, the language of instruction at school is generally English. But I also learned Zulu in school, too!
[Page 3]
Top panel 1: A background of wide abstract paint strokes.
Iben’s narration: Afrikaans is kind of a mixed language that has influences from languages like Dutch, Khoekhoe, Malay, Portuguese, and more.
Top panel 2: Iben is holding a polka dotted umbrella in her right hand. There is an arrow coming out of the umbrella, pointing to a typed text that reads, “Sombrinha” in Portuguese.
Iben’s narration: If you’re a Portuguese speaker, I bet you can guess what the Afrikaans word “Sambreel” means!
Bottom panel 1: A bold background filled with a pattern of bananas. There is a mixture of banana bunches, peeled single bananas, and unpeeled single bananas. Iben is gesturing upwards with her left hand.
Iben’s narration: “Piesang” means banana. IT comes formt he Malay word “Pisang”.
Bottom panel 2: A delicate background with a pattern of ladybugs, flowers, and leaves. Iben is gesturing upwards with her left hand.
Iben’s narration: Khoekhoe is a language indigenous to souther Africa. The Afrikaans word “Gogga” (insect) comes from the Khoekhoe word “xoxo-i!”
[Page 4]
Top panel 1: A pair of striped knit winter gloves are seen.
Iben’s narration: The word for “gloves” in Afrikaans is “handskoene”. It comes from the Dutch word “handschoenen.”
Top panel 2: A smaller, younger Iben has a “yikes” face with her teeth visible. She has her bare hands out in front of her. She is wearing a white scarf.
Iben’s narration: One time when I was little, my family and I were traveling in Rome during winter. It was cold and I needed gloves. So I went to a store to buy some.
Bottom panel: The background is what looks like a clothing store. There is a speech bubble coming out of young Iben, and it reads “Do you have handshoes?”. Iben looks pretty confident.
A person with short dark hair, probably a worker at the store, is sweating a little and is smiling confusedly at Iben. There is a question mark above their head to the left, indicating their confusion.
[Page 5]
Top panel: We’re back to present-day Iben. Iben is seen speaking excitedly to a young Black woman, who is smiling and seems to be speaking back to Iben. She has dreadlocks tied into a low, voluminous ponytail.
Iben’s narration: Something I like about being multilingual is the intercultural empathy that it facilitates. Being able to connect with people who also speak the languages I speak is of course nice,
Bottom panel: A scene showing Iben seated inside a passenger aircraft. She is seen to the right side of the panel, seated at an aisle seat, reaching over and speaking to a woman seated on the other side of the aisle. The woman is light skinned and is wearing a hijab and is modestly dressed. Hand-written text indicating Iben’s speech reads, “Do you need help?”. We see in this panel that Iben is quite tall and slender.
Iben’s narration (continued from previous panel): But even when I don’t share a language with someone, I am still able to approach them with kindness, patience, and observantness.
[Page 6]
Top panel 1: A side profile of the small, young Iben from earlier is seen at the left side of the panel, she has the striped gloves from earlier in her hands, but she is not wearing them. It seems that she was able to acquire the handshoes at the store after all, and looks content to have acquired the gloves. To the right of the panel, we see a slightly older, probably teenaged Iben who is putting on the same striped gloves. The young Iben and the teenage Iben are both wearing dark pants and a white turtleneck sweater. The background is a top-to-bottom gradation of grey to white.
Iben’s narration: Afrikaans is obviously a big part of my identity. I’ve been speaking it my entire life.
Top panel 2: This panel is artistically a continuation of the previous panel, meaning that the previous panel and this panel are essentially a single image, just separated by the comic panel division. A present-day Iben is seen speaking to someone on a smartphone. She is wearing the striped gloves from earlier, and the background shows a larger surface area of the grey shade from earlier, and snow is falling from the sky. Iben looks happy and it gesturing towards the snow with her left hand, as if trying to catch a snowflake. Hand-written text above her reads, “Mum, dit sneeu!”.
Iben’s narration: Especially here in Canada, it helps me stay connected to my home country.
Bottom panel: A shaded background with horizontal lines of a barbed wire fence.
Iben’s narration: But Afrikaans has a lot of historical baggage. Afrikaans and English have an association with the violent apartheid era of South Africa.
[Page 7] Another abstract grayscale painting in a style similar to the previous page.
The top panel and the bottom panel on this page seems to form a single contemporary abstract painting, just divided by the comic panel division. The painting is grayscale, and a mixture of hand-drawn watercolor paint strokes, watercolor splatters, white and grey screen tones, and transparent rectangles with a watercolor paper texture. There is a white string-like undulating line that is coming in from the upper left corner of the top panel, forming into a light tangle in the bottom right corner of the bottom panel. The painting as a whole evokes feelings of complication and emotionality.
Iben’s narration (top panel): I was born after the apartheid era and I don’t condone the past atrocities. But the history cannot be divorced from this language that I speak.
Iben’s narration (bottom panel): So I wonder: What does it mean for me to be an “Afrikaans speaker” in a post-apartheid world? Sometimes, I’m not sure.
The bottom right string tangle coincides with the text box that reads “Sometimes, I’m not sure.”
[Page 8]
The entire page is another abstract painting in a style similar to the previous page. The background is a light grey watercolor wash, and a concentration of watercolor splatters of a lighter grey can be vaguely seen towards the bottom of the panel in the background. Towards the top of the painting, there is a wide line of the same style watercolor splatter in a darker grey, clearly visible against the lighter grey background. This line of splatter is coming in from the upper right corner of the page, and extends and disappears towards the left side of the page in a diagonal line. This line of splattered paint almost looks like bubbles, a river, or a milkyway. The white string-like line from the previous page is coming in from the top of the page, and forms a person-like figure in the middle of the page. This figure vaguely looks like the backside of Iben with her curly hair, and the right side of her face can be seen a little bit, although no facial expressions are shown.
Iben’s narration: But maybe --- this very act of asking these difficult questions, reflectin on my positionality, and thinking about what actions I can take towards reconciliation is one way of being an “Afrikaans speaker”. It’s complex, but I’m working on figuring out who I am in this new socio-historical context.
[Page 9]
Entire panel: A present-day Iben is smiling calmly at the readers. The background is filled with sparkly circles that evoke feelings of inspiration.
Iben’s narration: My name is Iben. I represent a new generation of Afrikaans speakers.
[Page 10]
Page title: About the L’IMAGE project
Project PI and comic artist: Ai Taniguchi, Assistant Professor, UTM Department of Language Studies
Research Assistant: Haili Su, MA Student, UTSG Department of Linguistics
Special thanks to: Gilbert Lin, Assistant Director, Intercultural & Global Initiatives, UTM International Education Centre
With the generous support of: UofT International Student Experience Fund, UTM Department of Language Studies, UTM International Education Centre
Learn more: http://www.lingcomics.com
Bottom right of page shows the University of Toronto Mississauga logo and the University of Toronto logo.
INFOGRAPHIC
Content Warning: This infographic discusses South Africa’s apartheid era, with mentions of racial segregation, slavery, and oppression. There is also a brief reference to the oppression of the Deaf community in South Africa.
[Page 1]
Subtitle: Five-minute linguistics with L’IMAGE Aji!
Main title, over red banner: Languages of South Africa
Afrikaans is a mixed language on the creole continuum: it is a language that developed from differing languages coming into contact with each other and mixing into a new form. Afrikaans has influences from Khoisan languages indigenous to Africa, Bantu languages indigenous to Africa, Malay, Portuguese, Dutch, and more. Afrikaans developed in the 17th and 18th century as a result of the colonization of South Africa by the Dutch. So for historical reasons, Afrikaans is closely related to Dutch, but has major linguistic influences from indigenous African languages and the languages of others enslaved by the Dutch.
Afrikaans is the first language of 76% of Coloured South Africans (“Coloured” here is a common term of self-identification by multiracial ethnic communities in South Africa), 61% of White South Africans, and 2% of Black South Africans, and 5% of Indian South Africans.
As of May 2023, South Africa has 12 official languages. In alphabetical order, they are: Afrikaans, English, IsiNdebele, IsiXhosa, IsiZulu, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, Siswati, South African Sign Language, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga. Most South Africans speak two or more languages.
The background shows an image of the flag of South Africa in the shape of the country. The flag of South Africa is black, yellow, green, red, white, and blue.
Footnote at the bottom reads: Image credit: Stephen Finn / Shutterstock.com
[Long description of infographic pages:]
Each page of the infographic is in color. It has a University of Toronto color scheme: navy blue, light blue, and bright red.
L’IMAGE Aji is a fish character drawn in a style reminiscent of Sanrio characters like Hello Kitty. It is generally round in its silhouette and features. It has a pastel blue body with a yellow stripe, white belly, and yellow fins. It has two round eyes and round, pink blush on the cheeks, with a cat-like smiling mouth. There are bubbles coming out above it.
[Page 2]
Subtitle: Five-minute linguistics with L’IMAGE Aji!
Main title, over red banner: Languages of South Africa
From 1948 to 1994, South Africa was ruled under the apartheid policy (apartheid = ‘apartness’ in Afrikaans), which was a legislative system under an all-white government that upheld racial segregation and the oppression of non-white South Africans. Racism against Black, Indian, and multiracial South Africans predates the apartheid rule, but apartheid legalized it.
Anti-apartheid activism, most notably by members of the African National Congress (ANC), helped end the apartheid regime. Apartheid rule officially ended when Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994. In 1996, South Africa established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to acknowledge the truth of what happened during the apartheid and to work towards reparation and reconciliation.
Afrikaans and English were the official languages of South Africa under apartheid rule; so these languages carry a lot of historical baggage. Navigating a post-apartheid identity is extremely tricky for Afrikaans speakers as a result, including young people who were born after the apartheid era.
Next to the second paragraph about Nelson Mendela, a painting of Nelson Mandela is seen. The painting looks like gray scale watercolor, except the gray is navy blue. Nelson Mandela is an elderly black man wearing a suit in this depiction.
[Page 3]
Subtitle: Five-minute linguistics with L’IMAGE Aji!
Main title, over red banner: Languages of South Africa
Since the end of the apartheid rule, South Africans have been grappling with the question of national identity: what does being South African mean? What is the “new South Africa”? They strive for national unity, but they must also acknowledge their citizens’ differences when addressing social inequities. Attitudes about South African identity vary among South African people.
How do Afrikaans speakers deal with the historical baggage of the language? We’ve seen repeatedly through the L’IMAGE project that language is intimately tied to your identity. This is a very complex issue.
What does it mean for someone to be an Afrikaans speaker in a post-apartheid world?
At the bottom of the page, a navy blue vector image of what is presumably a highway sign in South Africa is seen. The sign says “R24 Johannesburg” with an upwards arrow at the top, and “R21 Pretoria” with a left arrow. The highway number names are written in yellow. The rest of the text on the sign is in white.
[Page 4]
Subtitle: Five-minute linguistics with L’IMAGE Aji!
Main title, over red banner: Languages of South Africa
White Afrikaans speakers are sometimes called “Afrikaners”. What does “being an Afrikaner” mean? There is no easy (or singular) way to answer this question. Some people reject this term due to political connotations that it has acquired and would self-identify simply as white Afrikaans speakers. On the other hand, some young white South Africans are forging a new, “alternative Afrikaner” identity. They acknowledge that they speak a language with a certain history. At the same time, they do not necessarily see distancing themselves from the historical baggage as the solution. They condemn the atrocities of the past, correct myths about the past, and fight against injustices that persist still today as a result of the past. They challenge old Afrikaner values and forge a new Afrikaner identity. Perhaps for some, this is one way of being an Afrikaans speaker in the post-apartheid South Africa. For others, there may be different answers to this question.
We recommend Vestergaard 2001 (Who's got the map? The negotiation of Afrikaner identities in post-apartheid South Africa) if you’d like to learn more about this topic.
A navy blue vector image of three raised clenched fists are seen at the bottom of the page.
[Page 5]
Subtitle: Five-minute linguistics with L’IMAGE Aji!
Main title, over red banner: Languages of South Africa
As mentioned earlier, South Africa has 12 official languages. Let’s take a tour of these languages!
Afrikaans is similar to Dutch in many ways (in fact, the two languages are mostly mutually intelligible), but one interesting feature of Afrikaans that is absent in Dutch is negative concord. Negative concord is when two negations essentially act as one. Compare the Afrikaans sentence and Dutch sentence below:
-
Hy is nie moeg nie. (Afrikaans)
He is NEG tired NEG
‘He is not tired’
-
Hij is niet moe (Dutch)
He is NEG tired
‘He is not tired’
Both (1) and (2) mean ‘He is not tired’, but you’ll notice that Afrikaans has the word for “not” twice in the sentence!
L’IMAGE Aji is seen smiling in the bottom right corner.
[Page 6]
Subtitle: Five-minute linguistics with L’IMAGE Aji!
Main title, over red banner: Languages of South Africa
In May 2023, the National Assembly of South Africa approved South African Sign Language (SASL) to become the 12th official language of the nation. SASL is predominantly used by Deaf people in South Africa. The history of signed languages in South Africa and the oppression that Deaf South Africans have experienced are deeply intertwined with the apartheid era. We recommend Aarons & Akach (1998) as a starting point for learning more about this topic.
Signed languages are manual-visual languages because you use your hands and arms (plus other parts of your body) for articulation, they’re transmitted via light waves, and you receive and process them via the visual system. This differs from spoken languages (like Cantonese, Anishinaabemowin, and Somali that we’ve seen already), which are vocal-auditory.
As with all languages, there are different dialects of SASL. Here are three different ways to sign “teacher” in SASL (there are more)!
A black-and-white illustration of characters signing “teacher” two ways in SASL is seen at the bottom of the page. The illustrations shos crisply drawn cartoon characters, and arrows consisting of a bright light blue color and a bright red color are used to show hand movements. Hands drawn in lighter opacity are also used to show hand movements. The first signer is probably a young Black man with short afro-style hair. He is making a pinching gesture with all fingers with both hands. The drawing indicates that you make a back and forth movement in front of your chin with this hand shape, starting near the side of your cheeks and moving both hands forward and closer together so that your index fingers almost touch.
The second signer is probably a young Black woman with dreadlocks tied into a low curly ponytail. Her skintone is darker than the previous signer, and she is wearing small earrings. She is making a pointing shape with her right hand, with her index finger pointed. Her left hand is in a fist near her chin. Her right hand with the index finger out moves towards the base of her left thumb. The illustration indicates that you make this pointing movement back and forth.
[Page 7]
Subtitle: Five-minute linguistics with L’IMAGE Aji!
Main title, over red banner: Languages of South Africa
Languages of South Africa: Nguni languages
IsiXhosa, IsiZulu, SiSwati, and IsiNdebele belong to the Nguni branch of the Bantu language family. There is some degree of mutual intelligibility between languages in this family.
IsiXhosa, IsiZulu, SiSwati, and IsiNdebele all have click consonants. A click consonant is a type of stop consonant, which means that there is a complete obstruction of airflow during the articulation of the sound. For example, /p/ as in “puck” is a stop consonant because you close your lips completely when you pronounce it. /d/ as in “duck” is also a stop consonant, since the tip of your tongue presses firmly against the little ridge behind your top teeth. Clicks are a type of stop consonant where air is sucked in by quickly lowering the tongue. In English, “tsk, tsk!” (the sound you make when expressing disapproval) is a type of click sound. Xhosa is known for its especially rich inventory of click consonants: it has at least 15 click consonants in total!
L'IMAGE Aji’s speech bubble: Check out XhosaKhaya on Youtube to hear the production fo click consonants in IsiXhosa!
[Page 8]
Subtitle: Five-minute linguistics with L’IMAGE Aji!
Main title, over red banner: Languages of South Africa
Languages of South Africa: Sotho languages
Sepedi, Sesotho, and Setswana belong to the Sotho branch of the Bantu language family. There is some degree of mutual intelligibility between languages in this family.
Languages of South Africa: Other language groups
Xitsonga (a.k.a. Tsonga) belongs to the Tswa-Ronga branch of the Bantu language family.
Tshivenda (a.k.a. Venda) belongs to the Bantu language family, but is not a part of the other sub-branches we’ve seen so far.
English. English is an Indo-European language of Germanic origin. There are several ethnic varieties of South African English, including Black South African English (BSAE), White South African English (WSAE), Indian English, Coloured English, and Afrikaans English.
L’IMAGE Aji’s speech bubble: Check out some of our recommended resources on the next page to learn more about the official languages of South Africa!
[Page 9]
References
Aarons, D., & Akach, P. (1998). South African Sign Language-one language or many? A sociolinguistic question. Stellenbosch papers in Linguistics, 31, 1-28.
Anderson et al. (2022). Chapter 3: Phonetics. Essentials of Linguistics (2nd ed.). eCampusOntario.
Biberauer, T., & Zeijlstra, H. (2012). Negative Concord in Afrikaans: filling a typological gap. Journal of Semantics, 29(3), 345-371.
Ladefoged, P., & Traill, A. (1994). Clicks and their accompaniments. Journal of Phonetics, 22(1), 33-64.
Statistics South Africa (2012). Census 2011 Census in Brief.
Verwey, C., & Quayle, M. (2012). Whiteness, racism, and Afrikaner identity in post-apartheid South Africa. African Affairs, 111(445), 551-575.
Vestergaard, M. (2001). Who's got the map? The negotiation of Afrikaner identities in post-apartheid South Africa. Daedalus, 130(1), 19-44.
Learn more
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Taalportaal Afrikaans grammar: https://www.taalportaal.org/taalportaal/resources/qanda.html
-
More about signed Languages:
https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/essentialsoflinguistics2/chapter/3-1-modality/
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More about South African Sign Language:
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Languages of South Africa (including linguistic maps):
https://www.south-africa-tours-and-travel.com/languages-of-south-africa.html
Acknowledgement
Expert Consultant (Afrikaans)**
Andries W. Coetzee
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University of Michigan
Barend Beekhuizen (Dutch data)**
**Errors, if any, are the PI’s oversight.
[Page 10]
Page title: About the L’IMAGE project
Project PI and comic artist: Ai Taniguchi, Assistant Professor, UTM Department of Language Studies
Research Assistant: Haili Su, MA Student, UTSG Department of Linguistics
Special thanks to: Gilbert Lin, Assistant Director, Intercultural & Global Initiatives, UTM International Education Centre
With the generous support of: UofT International Student Experience Fund, UTM Department of Language Studies, UTM International Education Centre
Learn more: http://www.lingcomics.com
Bottom right of page shows the University of Toronto Mississauga logo and the University of Toronto logo.