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lexical item

kanala

also: kanalla, kanalah, kanalawerk, kanalahwerk

Sourced2 citations
Kaapseverydayin-group

Please, and also to do something for someone as an unpaid favour. Recorded as a politeness word by Davids and as an intransitive verb by the DSAE, to help or care for someone. The related kanalawerk is work done for a neighbour or friend as a favour rather than for payment. From Malay karna Allah.

Where it comes from

No one person coined this.

It comes from Cape Muslim Afrikaans speakers of Cape Town. 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.

1951precise to the year

The DSAE records dated citations from 1951 (L.G. Green, Grow Lovely), 1981 and 1992, so 1951 is the earliest instance that can be pointed to. That is the earliest the DSAE records, which is not the same as the earliest that exists, and it must not harden into an origin date. Oral use is much older: Davids treats the word as part of the Malay lexicon the Cape Muslim community inherited from enslaved Southeast Asian ancestors, and the DSAE records Kanalahdorp as a name for District Six, which places the practice in everyday Cape life long before anyone wrote it down. One thing this entry deliberately does not claim: an earlier draft said that asking kanala invokes a reciprocal obligation. Neither cited source says that, so it has been cut. What the sources do support is unpaid favour work done for a neighbour or friend.

What changed on the way out

Outside the community the word tends to flatten into a plain please, losing the favour-work sense that both the DSAE gloss and community usage carry. It has some currency in Cape South African English and very little national reach.

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.

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.

  1. scholarshipcommunity voice

    Achmat Davids, 'Some Lexical Aspects of Cape Muslim Afrikaans', Lexikos 2 (1992), 39 to 62. Davids was a Cape Muslim historian writing about his own community

    Achmat Davids

    “kanalla [kanala] (noun), Malayu = karna Allah, please”

  2. dictionary

    kanalah, v.i., Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (entry e03636). Note the lemma spellings differ across sources: DSAE has kanalah, Davids kanalla

    “To help or care for someone; to please. Adaptation of Malay karna Allah.”

Something wrong here? Correct it. Corrections from speakers of a variety take precedence over anything recorded here.