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discourse marker
also: heit, eita, heyta, heitha, heito, heita daar
A greeting: hello. Also in the phrase heita daar (hello there). Recorded by the Dictionary of South African English as urban and especially township usage, and by the 1980s the standard greeting of the mapantsula.
No one person coined this.
It comes from South African township speech communities. The record credits the speech community and the earliest citation that proves it, because Tsotsitaal and Iscamtho was made by a community over time and not in a moment anyone wrote down.
1963 is the earliest of the thirteen dated quotations the DSAE prints (1963 to 1994), not a first use: the word was spoken long before Modisane wrote it down. The etymology is recorded here as the DSAE records it, which is to say UNSETTLED. The DSAE gives the origin as 'Unknown', then offers two incompatible leads and declines to choose. Mfenyana (1980) traces it to the Dutch article het; the DSAE's own note says 'but see quotation 1964', pointing at L.G. Green's Old Men Say (1964), which reports the greeting 'Het ou Pellie!' as belonging essentially to CAPE TOWN and cites an expert placing it in the Malay-Portuguese group. Those two accounts disagree about both the donor language and the city, and neither is settled, so neither is asserted here. Note also the variety label: the DSAE files this as urban and especially township English rather than as a tsotsitaal-only item, and it is entered here on the township tie that Mfenyana, Mzamane and Thoka's mapantsula citation establish.
The drift is political rather than commercial, and it is documented inside a single dictionary entry. Through the 1960s and 1970s the citations are ordinary township greetings. From 1989 the same word is a salute at mass meetings: the Weekly Mail records 'Heita Mandela, heita Sisulu', Kentridge's Unofficial War (1990) calls Heytha 'the UDF greeting' and notes the word has 'become so loaded with political implications', and by 1993 the Sunday Times prints 'Heyta, comrade mama Marika de Klerk'. A greeting became a way of saying which side you were on.
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.
“Heit, bricade, he said, this is my cheerie.”
Hello, comrade, he said, this is my girlfriend.
Bloke Modisane, Blame Me on History, DSAE's earliest citation, Jan 1963
“Heit! majita. Hi! Bella, he greeted.”
Hello, guys. Hi, Bella. The same DSAE entry that records heita records majita alongside it.
Mbulelo Mzamane, Children of Soweto, Jan 1982
“Cheers of Heita Mandela, heita Sisulu.”
The greeting used as a political salute, four years before the first democratic election.
Thami Mkhwanazi, Weekly Mail, Jan 1989
Community voices first, then the sources closest to the community. Press and dictionary citations are evidence about a word’s spread, not its origin.
“'Heit, bricade,' he said, 'this is my cheerie'”
“he traces its parent-term to the Dutch article Het, as in 'het man, die man'”
“Unknown; perhaps adaptation of Dutch het the (see Mfenyana quotation 1980); but see quotation 1964”
Something wrong here? Correct it. Corrections from speakers of a variety take precedence over anything recorded here.