Reflections of Afrikaans in the English Short Stories of Herman Charles Bosman

Herman Charles Bosman (1905-1951) was a bilingual English-Afrikaans author of short stories. His English stories, including the 60 Oom Schalk Lourens stories, represent Afrikaans characters in an Afrikaans cultural setting. This chapter examines the vocabulary and selected grammatical features in an electronic corpus of the Oom Schalk Lourens stories to determine the extent and authenticity of the reflection of Afrikaans culture through the English language. Results indicate that Afrikaans (and a limited number of Setswana) vocabulary items are used to denote people, the landscape and living spaces of characters, but also cultural practices such as terms of address, religion (including religious duplicity), and the history of the people. English grammatical structures that are at the margins on conventionality in English itself, but which correspond to Afrikaans grammatical structures, are used much more frequently by Bosman, to evoke the Afrikaans language grammatically. Bosman succeeds in treading a fine line between reflection of another language and culture and caricature, in order to tell stories of deceptive simplicity that serve as vehicle for his social criticism.