Master of Arts (by dissertation) — Afrikaans postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

On Tuesday evenings I check Afrikaans subtitles for a small post-production company, and most of the work is counting. A line may stay on screen for about two seconds, so when a character in a Cape Flats drama says something like "Ek is gatvol, man, ek gaan nie weer vir hom wag nie," I have to decide what survives into a shorter written line. The clients usually want standard spelling. The actors are speaking Kaaps. Deciding whether to keep "gatvol" or soften it, and whether to write "nie" twice or once, has become the practical side of a question I first met at university: how written norms treat the varieties most Afrikaans speakers actually use.

I completed a BA in Afrikaans and Linguistics and then an Honours year. My Honours research essay looked at code-switching between Afrikaans and English in call-in segments on a community radio station in the Boland. With the station manager's permission I transcribed about six hours of archived broadcasts, anonymising callers, and coded each switch by position in the sentence and by topic. The clearest pattern was that callers often moved into English for numbers, dates and institutional terms such as "municipality" or "rates", while personal stories, complaints and jokes stayed largely in Afrikaans. I was careful not to claim too much from one station and a small sample, but the project taught me how slow and how revealing close transcription can be. I also learnt to separate what I expected to hear from what was on the recording.

My reading has followed the same thread. Courses on the history of the language introduced me to the Arabic-Afrikaans texts written by Cape Muslim communities in the nineteenth century, which complicate the familiar story of Afrikaans as a language shaped mainly by its standardisers. More recent discussion of Kaaps as a written language, in poetry and in theatre, made me want to understand how spelling choices carry claims about identity and legitimacy. For a dissertation I would like to examine how Kaaps is represented in subtitles and other screen text, comparing what speakers say with what appears on screen, and asking which features are regularly standardised and which are kept. My subtitling work has given me a sense of the constraints involved, but I want to study them systematically rather than case by case.

During the day I work as a library assistant at a public library. Much of the job is ordinary: shelving, processing returns, helping people print forms. I also run a fortnightly reading hour for primary school children, and I have noticed how quickly children who speak Kaaps at home notice when a book sounds "like us" and when it does not. That observation is anecdotal, and I would not build a dissertation on it, but it keeps reminding me that questions about variety and standard affect real readers.

Outside work I coach an under-13 netball team at my old primary school on Saturdays. Coaching has nothing to do with linguistics, though it has made me better at planning, at explaining one idea several ways, and at keeping going through a wet season with a losing team that still turns up. A dissertation degree needs that kind of steadiness: there is no weekly timetable to carry me, so I will have to set my own deadlines and keep them.

I am applying for a Master's by dissertation because I already have a defined question, some experience with transcription and coding, and practical knowledge of the material I want to analyse. What I need is supervision, a stronger grounding in sociolinguistic theory and research ethics, and the time to do the project properly. I would bring careful habits, fluency in both Afrikaans and English, and a strong interest in how the language is written by and for the people who speak it.