Identities in change in postcolonial contexts: the case of Namibian German in written communication

The German speech community in Namibia is very vital despite having only 25,000 speakers who speak a variety of German called Namibian German, which is characterised by strong language contact between Afrikaans, English and Ntu languages. It is an uncoded variety but it is present in texts that contribute to the creation of the language model, such as the newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung Namibia. Namibian German has its roots in the colonial period when the official language was German but, due to the later South African hegemony, language policies changed. This chapter will highlight the relation between identity and intertextual dynamics of Namibian German through a corpus-based analysis consisting of 583 collected articles from Allgemeine Zeitung Namibia. The study conducted confirms the presence of namibianims also in written communication, above all in the category Glosse (satirical comments) of the newspaper.