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 Afrikaans pages
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An Introduction to the Language
History
Afrikaans is the youngest of all Germanic languages. It’s a descendant of the Dutch language. South Africa was colonised mainly by the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and many people from Europe came to settle down in South Africa. Dutch settling of the region which is today Cape Town started in 1652 when the Dutch East India Company established a nutritional reinforcement fort there, which would supply groceries to passer-by ships trading between Europe and the East. After the short-lived de facto apartheid which separated the Dutch settlers from, among others, French religious refugees and German settlers, a community started to develop at the Cape of Good Hope and the extended farming areas which used a language of governance which was then still considered Dutch, but which was actually an Old Dutch dialect already being influenced by the other European languages as well as the languages of the slaves, such as Malay. The residents of the Cape of Good Hope therefore spoke an early version of Afrikaans but it was considered a dialect and Dutch was still used by Afrikaans speakers in writing until the twentieth century AD. From the late beginnings of the formation of the new language, derogatorily called "Kitchen Dutch" by some, an unorganized movement began to promote the usage of Afrikaans in a written form, especially in institutionalised environments such as government, trade and banking. Volunteers started to compile collections of nursery rhymes and little poems in an unregulated form of "Afrikaans Dutch".
After a while the descendants of the Dutch immigrants didn’t want to consider themselves as Dutch anymore, nor did they speak the Dutch language in its continental form anymore; therefore they called their language Afrikaans, the language of the Afrikaners, the Africans, which in this case were the Dutch Africans. "Afrikaans" is a Dutch word meaning "African". The difference between the African dialect of Dutch and Dutch was mainly the vocabulary but also the simplification of the language. Afrikaans had many loan words from for example Malay, Portuguese and from all the other languages of the European settlers that were living in South Africa. Much of the Dutch was also based on Dutch dialects which shows its presence in words like hulle ”they”, compare the Dutch dialectal word ”zullie” (in stead of the standard Dutch ”zij”).
Afrikaans was long written like Dutch but as time went on, the African Dutch (i.e Afrikaans) grew in preference over the European and the spelling changed. Afrikaans became the official language of South Africa together with English in 1961 and was joined by the other nine now official languages of South Africa after apartheid in 1994.
Family
Indo-European
- Germanic
- West Germanic
- Low Franconian
- Dutch
- Afrikaans
- Dutch
- Low Franconian
- West Germanic
Spoken in
Afrikaans is an official language only in South Africa. It is also spoken in Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and the Netherlands. There are approximately 12 million speakers, about half of which are native speakers.
