Ph. D.--Essen, 1998. / Ed. mise à jour et revue de la thèse. Bibliogr. p. 293-304. Index.

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the department of AFRICAN LANGUAGES at the UNIVERSITY OF ZULULAND, 2001. / This document consists of five chapters which are as follows: Chapter 1 is an introductory part where the primary concept "pidgin" will be defined. Other basic terms namely survey, target language, lingua franca, mother tongue and others are also defined. It will deal with a survey of pidgins of the world where trends of Fanakalo as a pidgin begin to appear. Chapter 2 will deal with comparison of Fanakalo varieties to the standard form of isiZulu where linguistic aspects such as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics will be highlighted. Chapter 3 will focus on the extent to which Fanakalo lexicon can be compared with that of isiZulu. This will necessitate the inclusion of sociolinguistic aspects such as borrowing, adaptation, coinage and interlarding. Chapter 4 is concerned with the perceptions of Fanakalo by members of the community where the results of the interviews conducted will be given and analyzed accordingly. Chapter 5 which is the final chapter will be the conclusion where the viability of Fanakalo in the "New" South Africa as well as general statements about Fanakalo will be given.

As the world becomes smaller through advances in telecommunications, the need for communication between speakers of different languages becomes greater. Concerns about cultural and economic hegemony argue against the use of any natural language, and machine translation is not yet perfected and available to speakers of all languages. With the technological developments of the last decade, such as powerful computers, graphical interfaces, and the World Wide Web, an excellent opportunity has been created for a computer-mediated visual interlingua to meet this need. An iconic language could be designed to take advantage of the technology. People would be able to communicate with an iconic language without the need to draw pictures themselves, since they could choose these pictures from the screen. This dissertation describes VIL, an iconic visual interlingua based on the notion of simplified speech. Similar to pidgins, languages arising from the prolonged contact between people speaking two or more languages, VIL utilizes features that are in the 'greatest common denominator' of features in different languages. This allows its complexity to be significantly reduced; for example, it has no inflection, no number, gender, or tense markers, and no articles. VIL has no linear order. This is possible because it was designed as a visual language, in contrast to written languages which are the result of a transfer to visual modality of spoken language, which evolved in the context of auditory modality where sequencing and ordering is critical. After reviewing previous research on universal languages that are artificial, non-artificial, and visual, VIL is described in detail, including its parts of speech, its grammar, and its organization for verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Throughout the discussion a set of principles is proposed, some of which are relevant to any universal language, others specific to visual or iconic languages. The development of a set of icons is also presented. Finally, the evaluations of the icons, language, and the system itself are described.