discourse marker
awê
also: aweh, awe
An all-purpose Kaaps greeting and affirmative: it opens a conversation, signals agreement or approval mid-conversation, and stands alone as an exclamation of enthusiasm. The WAT also records an adjectival sense, incredible or breathtaking.
Where it comes from
No one person coined this.
It comes from Cape Flats Kaaps speakers. The record credits the speech community and the earliest citation that proves it, because Kaaps was made by a community over time and not in a moment anyone wrote down.
The written record is thin and very recent. The earliest dated instance is the Die Burger quotation of 24 October 2014 that the WAT prints inside its own entry, and the word was only admitted to the WAT, Afrikaans's dictionary of record, in 2021. That is a dictionary citation, not a first use: awê has been ordinary spoken Cape Flats usage for far longer, and no printed instance from the 1990s or earlier could be found. Note also what the sources do and do not say: the Kaaps attribution rests on Williams and on the framing of the WAT's 2021 additions as admitting words from different varieties. The WAT itself labels the word plain geselstaal with no Cape or Kaaps tag, and the Sunday Times piece presents it as general South African slang. So: origin Cape Flats Kaaps, current usage national. The etymology is genuinely disputed (Williams suggests Javanese weh, a Cape community site derives it from isiXhosa ewe) and no etymological claim is recorded here as fact.
What changed on the way out
It has travelled well beyond the Cape Flats into general South African slang and now sits in the WAT as everyday spoken Afrikaans, usually with no Kaaps attribution attached. Speakers outside the Cape also tend to keep only the greeting sense and lose the agreement and approval senses that carry it in Kaaps conversation.
In use
Recorded means somebody said it and it was written down. Constructed means it was written here to show the shape of the word, and is an illustration rather than evidence.
- recorded
“Awê, hier's ek weer van die Lentegeur en ek wys jou ek is beter gebou dié keer”
Hey, here I am again from Lentegeur, and I will show you I am better built this time.
Die Burger, quoted in the WAT entry, Oct 2014
- constructed
“Awê, my bru.”
Hello, my brother.
- constructed
“Awê! Dis reg so.”
Yes! That is right.
The evidence
Community voices first, then the sources closest to the community. Press and dictionary citations are evidence about a word’s spread, not its origin.
- community explanationcommunity voice
- scholarship
“Die woord 'aweh', wat jy ook as 'awe' kan skryf, was sover ons weet gebruik heel moontlik voor die aankoms van die VOC.”
- dictionary
“Awê, hier's ek weer van die Lentegeur (Burg., 24 Okt. 2014)”
- press
Something wrong here? Correct it. Corrections from speakers of a variety take precedence over anything recorded here.