Bikkie, Bakkie, Bokkie: Namibian Kuchendeutsch

Like most languages, German has many flavors. In the industrial modern cities of Germany, words are quick and clipped. In Austrian towns, sentences roll like green hills, thick and throaty. My cousins in the alpine farm valleys of Switzerland speak softly and happily, and every noun seems to end in the affectionate "-li." But one of its most interesting variations is far outside the Sprachraum, the region of Central Europe where 88 million of German's 95 million native speakers live. In Namibia, Ku:chendeutsch (meaning kitchen German), has lived a brief and fascinating life that is now coming to an end.

Labelled a contact language, Namibian Kuchendeutsch emerged as a distinct dialect around 1900 as a mingling of Afrikaans, German, and various local languages, with German dominating. It evolved for the purpose of communication between German foreigners and locals doing business or work together. It has unique grammatical structures, including a different verb association with future tense (gehen rather than the usual werden), and as in all dialects a unique set of words.

Some fun words include:

• Drankwinkel (small drink shop)
• Kombi (small bus)
• Nuffel (young schoolchild)
• Robot (traffic lights)
• Uitlander (foreigner, would be called Auslander in Standard German)

And of course, bikkie (a little bit), bakkie (flatbed truck), and bokkie (goats and sheep). 

Today German remains what it has always been in Namibia: a minority language but with a strong presence due to its prevalence in urban and wealthy regions. However, Kuchendeutsch today is a dying dialect, with most German speakers reverting to the Standard German taught in schools worldwide or other languages more commonly spoken in the country.

- Madelyn

Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language_in_Namibia#Namibian_German_as_a_dialect
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/9787729F67B1329E31E3F73735FDF6AF/S1470542709990122a.pdf/namibian_kiche_duits_the_making_and_decline_of_a_neoafrican_language.pdf