Fanagalo, or Fanakalo, is a vernacular or pidgin based primarily on Zulu with input from English and a small amount of Afrikaans.
[3] It is used as a lingua franca, mainly in the gold, diamond, coal and copper mining industries in South Africa and to a lesser extent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
By the time independence came–or in the case of South Africa, universal suffrage–English had become sufficiently widely spoken and understood that it became the lingua franca, enabling different ethnic groups in the same country to communicate with each other, and Fanagalo use declined.
In the Nguni tongues, the prefix Mu- or Ma- denotes the singular, while Bu- or Ba- signifies the plural – hence Muntu = a man; Bantu = men, particularly when applied to tribes, e.g. Ma-tabele.
Fanagalo is one of a number of African pidgin languages that developed during the colonial period to promote ease of communication in South Africa.
The most common theory is that Fanagalo was created as a result of men speaking different languages (coming from different cultural backgrounds throughout South Africa and its neighbouring states) that went to work in the mines during the late 19th century.
In addition to Indigenous Africans, Afrikaans and English-speaking settlers and European immigrants (such as those of Portuguese, Polish and German descent) contributed to the development of Fanagalo for communication in the mines.
However, the pidgin language was and still is mostly spoken by miners from different tribes in South Africa and neighbouring states, which gives support to this theory.
However, a large increasing migration of Zulu people from Natal to Transvaal province, Cape province, and the Orange Free State to work in the mines validates this theory as most mines in South Africa are located in areas dominated by the native Sotho and Tswana peoples, yet there are few words in Fanagalo derived from these two languages and from other Bantu languages from South Africa and its neighboring states.
Secondly, women and children were not permitted to speak Fanagalo, meaning that family communication did not exist and there were little ways to expand the uses of the pidgin.
[3] In the mid-20th century in South Africa there were government-led efforts to promote and standardise Fanagalo as a universal second language, under the name of "Basic Bantu".
[citation needed] In contrast, mining companies in the early 21st century have attempted to phase out Fanagalo in favour of the pre-existing local languages.
In addition, there was a conscious effort to promote the use of English in domains where Fanagalo was predominantly used as a means of control.
[3] Ravyse (2018) discusses Fanagalo's apparent resistance to opposing official policy in spite of its ongoing stigma as a language for the illiterate.
Despite this decline in use, Fanagalo is still accepted as a part of mining culture and identity and is seen as a de facto policy and maintains its significance in its domain of use.
[6] The strong identity Fangalo speakers shared enabled homogeneity and therefore they were resistant to the inclusion of English and likely explains why the pidgin is still used today.
Bold remarks that Fanagalo had five monophthongs, five diphthongs, and two syllabic consonants with no tone or length contrast: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, /ai/, /ei/, /au/, /oi/, /ou/, /m̩/, and /n̩/.
[8] Mine Fanagalo in South Africa and Zimbabwe is based mostly on Zulu vocabulary (about 70%), with English (about 25%) and some words from Afrikaans (5%).