Retracing the racial semiotics of the other-lingual (anderstalige) in Dutch and Afrikaans: Exploring its emergence in South Africa and its (re-)emergence in Flanders

Abstract

This article explores the racial semiotics of the Dutch concept of the other-lingual ( de anderstalige). Multicultural discourse ostensibly encodes the otherness as merely linguistic; however, Flemish nationalist policy discourse deploys the other-lingual to discern autochthony from allochthony. Retracing the origins of this concept, we found that the concept did not originate in Dutch-speaking Europe, but we found earlier traces overseas in apartheid South Africa where the Afrikaans concept served the forced exclusion of coloured people. We conduct a semiotic analysis of the other-lingual to study how the concept racially encodes and decodes the Afrikaans language in South Africa and the Dutch language in Flanders. The dataset contains records in Dutch and Afrikaans, published in, or in regards to, the Netherlands, Suriname, Flanders (Belgium) and South Africa. Our semiotic analysis of the South African other-lingual engages with religious discourse published in 1950s South Africa. The semiotic analysis of Flemish other-lingual engages with its trajectory in Flemish Government Declarations from 1992 to 2022. The article concludes that the history of the other-lingual, revealing a racial identification between Flemings and Afrikaners, provides pivotal arguments for the contemporary understanding of race in the Dutch languages.