Afrikaans

Afrikaans(/ˌæfrɪˈkɑːns/AF-rih-KAHNSS,/ˌɑːf-,-ˈkɑːnz/AHF-, -⁠KAHNZ)is aWest Germanic language, spoken inSouth Africa,Namibiaand (to a lesser extent)Botswana,ZambiaandZimbabwe. It evolved from theDutch vernacularofSouth Holland(Hollandic dialect)spoken by thepredominantly Dutch settlersandenslaved populationof theDutch Cape Colony, where it gradually began to develop distinguishing characteristics in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Although Afrikaans has adopted words from other languages includingGerman,MalayandKhoisan languages, an estimated 90 to 95% of the vocabulary of Afrikaans is of Dutch origin.Differences between Afrikaans and Dutchoften lie in the moreanalyticmorphologyand grammar of Afrikaans, and different spellings.There is a large degree ofmutual intelligibilitybetween the two languages, especially inwritten form.
The name of the language comes directly from the Dutch wordAfrikaansch(now spelledAfrikaans)meaning 'African'.It was previously referred to as 'Cape Dutch' (Kaap-HollandsorKaap-Nederlands), a term also used to refer to theearly Cape settlerscollectively, or the derogatory 'kitchen Dutch' (kombuistaal) from its use by slaves of colonial settlers "in the kitchen".
The Afrikaans language arose in theDutch Cape Colony, through a gradual divergence from EuropeanDutch dialects, during the course of the 18th century.As early as the mid-18th century and as recently as the early-20th century, pre-standardized Afrikaans was still viewed by the many in Southern Africa as 'kitchen Dutch' (Afrikaans:kombuistaal), lacking the prestige accorded an officially recognised language like Dutch and English, at that time. In the 19th century Boer republics, proto-Afrikaans was not yet widely seen by the Afrikaner population itself, nor by its leaders, as a separate language to standard Dutch. Dutch was expressly the sole and only legally recognised language at that time. Other early epithets, in Southern Africa, setting apartKaaps Hollands('Cape Dutch', i.e. Proto-Afrikaans) as putatively beneath official Dutch language standards includedgeradbraakt,gebrokenandonbeschaafd Hollands('mutilated, broken, or uncivilised Dutch'), as well asverkeerd Nederlands('incorrect Dutch').
Historical linguist Hans den Besten theorises that modern Standard Afrikaans derives from two sources:
So Afrikaans, in his view, is neither a creole nor a direct descendant of Dutch, but a fusion of two transmission pathways.
Most of the firstsettlerswhose descendants today are theAfrikanerswere from theUnited Provinces(now Netherlands),with up to one-sixth of the community of FrenchHuguenotorigin, and a seventh from Germany.
African and Asian workers,Cape Colouredchildren of European settlers andKhoikhoiwomen,and slaves contributed to the development of Afrikaans. The slave population was made up of people from East Africa, West Africa,Mughal India,Madagascar, and theDutch East Indies(modern Indonesia).A number were also indigenousKhoisanpeople, who were valued as interpreters, domestic servants, and labourers. Many free and enslaved women married or cohabited with the male Dutch settlers. M. F. Valkhoff argued that 75% of children born to female slaves in the Dutch Cape Colony between 1652 and 1672 had a Dutch father.Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman argue that Afrikaans' development as a separate language was "heavily conditioned by nonwhites who learned Dutch imperfectly as a second language."
Beginning in about 1815, Afrikaans started to replaceMalayas the language of instruction inMuslim schoolsin South Africa, written with theArabic alphabet: seeArabic Afrikaans. Later, Afrikaans, now written with theLatin script, started to appear in newspapers and political and religious works in around 1850 (alongside the already established Dutch).
In 1875 a group of Afrikaans-speakers from the Cape formed theGenootskap vir Regte Afrikaaners('Society for Real Afrikaners'),and published a number of books in Afrikaans including grammars, dictionaries, religious materials and histories.
Until the early 20th century Afrikaans was considered aDutch dialect, alongsideStandard Dutch, which it eventually replaced as an official language.Before theBoer wars, "and indeed for some time afterwards, Afrikaans was regarded as inappropriate for educated discourse. Rather, Afrikaans was described derogatorily as 'a kitchen language' or 'a bastard jargon', suitable for communication mainly between the Boers and their servants."
In 1925 Afrikaans was recognised by the South African government as a distinct language, rather than simply a vernacular of Dutch.On 8 May 1925, that is 23 years after theSecond Boer Warended,theOfficial Languages of the Union Act, 1925was passed—mostly due to the efforts of theAfrikaans-language movement—at a joint sitting of theHouse of Assemblyand theSenate, in which the Afrikaans language was declared a variety of Dutch.TheConstitution of 1961reversed the position of Afrikaans and Dutch, so that English and Afrikaans were the official languages, and Afrikaans was deemed to include Dutch. TheConstitution of 1983removed any mention of Dutch altogether.
TheAfrikaans Language Monumentis on a hill overlookingPaarlin theWestern Cape Province. Officially opened on 10 October 1975,it was erected on the 100th anniversary of the founding of theSociety of Real Afrikaners,and the 50th anniversary of Afrikaans being declared an official language of South Africa in distinction to Dutch.
The earliest Afrikaans texts were somedoggerel versefrom 1795 and a dialogue transcribed by a Dutch traveller in 1825. Afrikaans used the Latin alphabet around this time, although theCape Muslimcommunity used the Arabic script. In 1861, L.H. Meurant published hisZamenspraak tusschen Klaas Waarzegger en Jan Twyfelaar(Conversation between Nicholas Truthsayer and John Doubter), which is considered to be the first book published in Afrikaans.
The first grammar book was published in 1876; a bilingual dictionary was later published in 1902. The main modern Afrikaans dictionary in use is theVerklarende Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal(HAT). A new authoritative dictionary, calledWoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal(WAT), was under development As of 2018.The officialorthographyof Afrikaans is theAfrikaanse Woordelys en Spelreëls, compiled byDie Taalkommissie.
The Afrikaners primarily were Protestants, of theDutch Reformed Churchof the 17th century. Their religious practices were later influenced in South Africa by British ministries during the 1800s.A landmark in the development of the language was the translation of the whole Bible into Afrikaans. While significant advances had been made in thetextual criticismof the Bible, especially the GreekNew Testament, the 1933 translation followed theTextus Receptusand was closely akin to theStatenbijbel. Before this, most Cape Dutch-Afrikaans speakers had to rely on the DutchStatenbijbel. ThisStatenvertalinghad its origins with theSynod of Dordrechtof 1618 and was thus in anarchaicform of Dutch. This was hard for Dutch speakers to understand, and increasingly unintelligible for Afrikaans speakers.
C. P. Hoogehout,Arnoldus Pannevis[af], andStephanus Jacobus du Toitwere the firstAfrikaans Bibletranslators. Important landmarks in the translation of the Scriptures were in 1878 with C. P. Hoogehout's translation of theEvangelie volgens Markus(Gospel of Mark, lit. 'Gospel according to Mark'); however, this translation was never published. The manuscript is to be found in the South African National Library, Cape Town.
The first official translation of the entire Bible into Afrikaans was in 1933 byJ. D. du Toit, E. E. van Rooyen, J. D. Kestell, H. C. M. Fourie, andBB Keet.This monumental work established Afrikaans as'n suiwer en ordentlike taal, that is "a pure and proper language" for religious purposes, especially among the deeplyCalvinistAfrikaans religious community that previously had been sceptical of aBible translationthat varied from the Dutch version that they were used to.
In 1983 a fresh translation marked the 50th anniversary of the 1933 version. The final editing of this edition was done by E. P. Groenewald, A. H. van Zyl, P. A. Verhoef, J. L. Helberg and W. Kempen. This translation was influenced byEugene Nida's theory ofdynamic equivalencewhich focused on finding the nearest equivalent in the receptor language to the idea that the Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic wanted to convey.
A new translation,Die Bybel: 'n Direkte Vertalingwas released in November 2020. It is the first trulyecumenicaltranslation of the Bible in Afrikaans as translators from various churches, including theRoman CatholicandAnglicanChurches, were involved.
Afrikaans descended from Dutch dialects in the 17th century. It belongs to aWest Germanicsub-group, theLow Franconian languages.Other West Germanic languages related to Afrikaans are German, English, theFrisian languages,Yiddish, and the unstandardised languageLow German.
Besides South-Africa, Afrikaans is also widely spoken in Namibia. Before independence, Afrikaans had equal status with German as an official language. Since independence in 1990, Afrikaans has had constitutional recognition as a national, but not official, language.There is a much smaller number of Afrikaans speakers among Zimbabwe's white minority, as most have left the country since 1980. Afrikaans was also a medium of instruction for schools inBophuthatswana, an Apartheid-eraBantustan.Eldoretin Kenya was founded by Afrikaners.
There are also around 30.000South-Africans in the Netherlands, of which the majority are of Afrikaans-speaking Afrikaner and Coloured South-African descent.A much smaller and unknown number of Afrikaans speakers also reside in theDutch Caribbean.
Contrary to popular belief, the majority of Afrikaans speakers today are notAfrikanersorBoers, butColoureds.
In 1976, secondary-school pupils inSowetobegana rebellionin response to the government's decision that Afrikaans be used as the language of instruction for half the subjects taught in non-White schools (with English continuing for the other half). AlthoughEnglishis themother tongueof only 8.2% of the population, it is the language most widely understood, and thesecond languageof a majority of South Africans.Afrikaans is more widely spoken than English in the Northern and Western Cape provinces, several hundred kilometres from Soweto. The Black community's opposition to Afrikaans and preference for continuing English instruction was underlined when the government rescinded the policy one month after the uprising: 96% of Black schools chose English (over Afrikaans or native languages) as the language of instruction.Afrikaans-medium schools were also accused of using language policy to deter Black African parents.Some of these parents, in part supported by provincial departments of education, initiated litigation which enabled enrolment with English as language of instruction. By 2006 there were 300 single-medium Afrikaans schools, compared to 2,500 in 1994, after most converted to dual-medium education.Due to Afrikaans being viewed as the "language of the white oppressor" by some, pressure has been increased to remove Afrikaans as a teaching language in South African universities, resulting in bloody student protests in 2015.
UnderSouth Africa's Constitutionof 1996, Afrikaans remains anofficial language, and has equal status to English and nine other languages. The new policy means that the use of Afrikaans is now often reduced in favour of English, or to accommodate the other official languages. In 1996, for example, theSouth African Broadcasting Corporationreduced the amount of television airtime in Afrikaans, whileSouth African Airwaysdropped its Afrikaans nameSuid-Afrikaanse Lugdiensfrom itslivery. Similarly, South Africa'sdiplomatic missionsoverseas now display the name of the country only in English and their host country's language, and not in Afrikaans. Meanwhile, theconstitution of the Western Cape, which went into effect in 1998, declares Afrikaans to be an official language of the province alongside English andXhosa.
The Afrikaans-language general-interest family magazineHuisgenoothas the largest readership of any magazine in the country.
When the British design magazineWallpaperdescribed Afrikaans as "one of the world's ugliest languages" in its September 2005 article about themonument,South African billionaireJohann Rupert(chairman of theRichemont Group), responded by withdrawing advertising for brands such asCartier,Van Cleef & Arpels,MontblancandAlfred Dunhillfrom the magazine.The author of the article, Bronwyn Davies, was anEnglish-speaking South African.
An estimated 90 to 95 percent of the Afrikaans lexicon is ultimately of Dutch origin,and there are few lexical differences between the two languages.Afrikaans has a considerably more regular morphology,grammar, and spelling.There is a high degree ofmutual intelligibilitybetween the two languages,particularly in written form.
Afrikaans acquired some lexical and syntactical borrowings from other languages such asMalay,Khoisan languages, Portuguese,German andBantu languages.Afrikaans has also been significantly influenced bySouth African English, especially in the Western Cape.Dutch speakers are confronted with fewer non-cognates when listening to Afrikaans than the other way round.Mutual intelligibility thus tends to be asymmetrical, as it is easier for Dutch speakers to understand Afrikaans than for Afrikaans speakers to understand Dutch.
In general, mutual intelligibility between Dutch and Afrikaans is far better than between Dutch andFrisianorbetweenDanish andSwedish.The South African poet writerBreyten Breytenbach, attempting to visualise the language distance forAnglophonesonce remarked that the differences between (Standard) Dutch and Afrikaans are comparable to those between theReceived PronunciationandSouthern American English.
Afrikaans is an official language of the Republic of South Africa and a recognised national language of the Republic of Namibia.Post-apartheid South Africahas seen a loss of preferential treatment by the government for Afrikaans, in terms of education, social events,media(TV and radio), and general status throughout the country, given that it now shares its place as official language with ten other languages. Nevertheless, Afrikaans remains more prevalent in the media – radio, newspapers and television– than any of the other official languages, except English. More than 300 book titles in Afrikaans are published annually.South African census figures suggest a decreasing number of first language Afrikaans speakers in South Africa from 13.5% in 2011 to 10.6% in 2022.TheSouth African Institute of Race Relations(SAIRR) projects that a growing majority of Afrikaans speakers will beColoured.Afrikaans speakers experience higher employment rates than other South African language groups, though as of 2012half a million were unemployed.
Despite the challenges of demotion and emigration that it faces in South Africa, the Afrikaans vernacular remains competitive, being popular inDSTVpay channels and several internet sites, while generating high newspaper and music CD sales. A resurgence in Afrikaans popular music since the late 1990s has invigorated the language, especially among a younger generation of South Africans. A recent trend is the increased availability of pre-school educational CDs and DVDs. Such media also prove popular with the extensive Afrikaans-speaking emigrant communities who seek to retain language proficiency in a household context.
Afrikaans-language cinema showed signs of new vigour in the early 21st century. The 2007 filmOuma se slim kind, the first full-length Afrikaans movie sincePaljasin 1998, is seen as the dawn of a new era in Afrikaans cinema. Several short films have been created and more feature-length movies, such asPoena Is KoningandBakgat(both in 2008) have been produced, besides the 2011 Afrikaans-language filmSkoonheid, which was the first Afrikaans film to screen at theCannes Film Festival. The filmPlattelandwas also released in 2011.The Afrikaans film industry started gaining international recognition via the likes of big Afrikaans Hollywood film stars, likeCharlize Theron(Monster) andSharlto Copley(District 9) promoting their mother tongue.
SABC 3announced early in 2009 that it would increase Afrikaans programming due to the "growing Afrikaans-language market and [their] need for working capital as Afrikaans advertising is the only advertising that sells in the currentSouth African televisionmarket". In April 2009, SABC3 started screening several Afrikaans-language programmes.There is a groundswell movement within Afrikaans to be inclusive, and to promote itself along with the indigenous official languages. In Namibia, the percentage of Afrikaans speakers declined from 11.4% (2001 Census) to 10.4% (2011 Census). The major concentrations are inHardap(41.0%),ǁKaras(36.1%),Erongo(20.5%),Khomas(18.5%),Omaheke(10.0%),Otjozondjupa(9.4%),Kunene(4.2%), andOshikoto(2.3%).
Some native speakers of Bantu languages andEnglishalso speak Afrikaans as a second language. It is widely taught in South African schools, with about 10.3 million second-language students.
Afrikaans is offered at many universities outside South Africa, including in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Russia and the United States.
In Afrikaans grammar, there is no distinction between theinfinitiveand present forms of verbs, with the exception of the verbs 'to be' and 'to have'.
In addition, verbs do notconjugatedifferently depending on the subject. For example,
Only a handful of Afrikaans verbs have apreterite, namely the auxiliarywees('to be'), themodal verbs, and the verbdink('to think').The preterite ofmag('may') is rare in contemporary Afrikaans.
All other verbs use the perfect tense, het + past participle (ge-), for the past. Therefore, there is no distinction in Afrikaans betweenI drankandI have drunk. (In colloquial German, the past tense is also often replaced with the perfect.)
When telling a longer story, Afrikaans speakers usually avoid the perfect and simply use the present tense, orhistorical present tenseinstead (as is possible, but less common, in English as well).
A particular feature of Afrikaans is its use of thedouble negative; it is classified in Afrikaans asontkennende vormand is something that is absent from the other West Germanic standard languages. For example:
Both French and San origins have been suggested for double negation in Afrikaans. While double negation is still found inLow Franconian dialectsinWest Flandersand in some "isolated" villages in the centre of the Netherlands (such asGarderen), it takes a different form, which is not found in Afrikaans. The following is an example:
Compare withEk wil dit nie doen nie, which changes the meaning to 'I want not to do this'. WhereasEk wil nie dit doen nieemphasizes a lack of desire to act,Ek wil dit nie doen nieemphasizes the act itself.
The-newas theMiddle Dutchway to negate but it has been suggested that since-nebecame highly non-voiced,nieornietwas needed to complement the-ne. With time the-nedisappeared in most Dutch dialects.
The double negative construction has been fully grammaticalised in standard Afrikaans and its proper use follows a set of fairly complex rules as the examples below show:
A notable exception to this is the use of the negating grammar form that coincides with negating the Englishpresent participle. In this case there is only a single negation.
Certain words in Afrikaans would be contracted. For example,moet nie, which literally means 'must not', usually becomesmoenie; although one does not have to write or say it like this, virtually all Afrikaans speakers will change the two words tomoeniein the same way asdo notis contracted todon'tin English.
The Dutch wordhet('it' in English) does not correspond tohetin Afrikaans. The Dutch words corresponding to Afrikaanshetareheb,hebt,heeftandhebben.
Following early dialectal studies of Afrikaans, it was theorised that three main historical dialects probably existed after the Great Trek in the 1830s. These dialects are the Northern Cape, Western Cape, and Eastern Cape dialects.Northern Cape dialect may have resulted from contact between Dutch settlers and theKhoekhoepeople between the Great Karoo and the Kunene, and Eastern Cape dialect between the Dutch and the Xhosa. Remnants of these dialects still remain in present-day Afrikaans, although the standardising effect of Standard Afrikaans has contributed to a great levelling of differences in modern times.
There is also a prisoncant, known asSabela, which is based on Afrikaans, yet heavily influenced byZulu. This language is used as a secret language in prison and is taught to initiates.
Patagonian Afrikaans is a distinct dialect of Afrikaans is spoken by the 650-strongSouth African communityof Argentina, in the region ofPatagonia.
Namibian Afrikaans is a variety of Afrikaans spoken inNamibia. The country was governed by South Africa until 1990, which had favoured Afrikaans. Before that, Dutch had been introduced when the Dutch occupiedWalvis Bayand the surrounding area.
Due to the early settlement of aCape Malaycommunity inCape Town, who are now known asColoureds, numerousClassical Malaywords were brought into Afrikaans. Some of these words entered Dutch via people arriving from what is now known as Indonesia as part of their colonial heritage. Malay words in Afrikaans include:
Some words originally came from Portuguese such assambreel('umbrella') from the Portuguesesombreiro,kraal('pen/cattle enclosure') from the Portuguesecurralandmielie('corn', frommilho). Some of these words also exist in Dutch, likesambreel'parasol',though usage is less common and meanings can slightly differ.
Some of these words also exist in Dutch, though with a more specific meaning:assegaaifor example means 'South-African tribal javelin'andkarosmeans 'South-African tribal blanket of animal hides'.
Loanwords fromBantu languagesin Afrikaans include the names of indigenous birds, such asmahemandsakaboela, and indigenous plants, such asmaroelaandtamboekie(gras).
The revoking of theEdict of Nanteson 22 October 1685 was a milestone in the history of South Africa, for it marked the beginning of the greatHuguenotexodus from France. It is estimated that between 250,000 and 300,000 Protestants left France between 1685 and 1700; out of these, according toLouvois, 100,000 had received military training. A measure of the calibre of these immigrants and of their acceptance by host countries (in particular South Africa) is given byH. V. Mortonin his book:In Search of South Africa(London, 1948). The Huguenots were responsible for a great linguistic contribution to Afrikaans, particularly in terms of military terminology as many of them fought on the battlefields during the wars of theGreat Trek.
Most of the words in this list are descendants from Dutch borrowings from French, Old French or Latin, and are not direct influences from French on Afrikaans.
The Afrikaanswriting systemis based onDutch, using the 26 letters of theISO basic Latin alphabet, plus 16 additional vowels withdiacritics. Thehyphen(e.g. in a compound likesee-eend'sea duck'),apostrophe(e.g.ma's'mothers'), and awhitespace character(e.g. in multi-word units likeDooie See'Dead Sea') is part of theorthographyof words, while the indefinite articleŉis aligature. All the alphabet letters, including those with diacritics, have capital letters asallographs; theŉdoes not have a capital letter allograph. This means that Afrikaans has 88graphemeswith allographs in total.
In Afrikaans, many consonants are dropped from the earlier Dutch spelling. For example,slechts('only') in Dutch becomesslegsin Afrikaans. Also, Afrikaans and some Dutch dialects make no distinction between/s/and/z/, having merged the latter into the former; while the word for "south" is writtenzuidin Dutch, it is spelledsuidin Afrikaans (as well as dialectal Dutch writings) to represent this merger. Similarly, the Dutch digraphĳ, normally pronounced as/ɛi/, corresponds to Afrikaansy, except where it replaces the Dutchsuffix–lijkwhich is pronounced as/lək/, as inwaarschijnlijk>waarskynlik.
Another difference is the indefinite article,'nin Afrikaans andeenin Dutch. "A book" is'n boekin Afrikaans, whereas it is eithereen boekor'n boekin Dutch. This'nis usually pronounced as just aweak vowel,[ə], just like English "a".
Thediminutivesuffix in Afrikaans is-tjie,-djieor-ie, whereas in Dutch it is-tjeordje, hence a "bit" isŉbietjiein Afrikaans andbeetjein Dutch.
The lettersc,q,x, andzoccur almost exclusively in borrowings from French, English, Greek andLatin. This is usually because words that hadcandchin the original Dutch are spelled withkandg, respectively, in Afrikaans. Similarly originalquandxare most often speltkwandks, respectively. For example,ekwatoriaalinstead ofequatoriaal, andekskuusinstead ofexcuus.
The vowels with diacritics in non-loanword Afrikaans are:á,ä,é,è,ê,ë,í,î,ï,ó,ô,ö,ú,û,ü,ý. Diacritics are ignored when alphabetising, though they are still important, even when typing the diacritic forms may be difficult. For example,geëet("ate") instead of the 3 e's alongside each other:*geeet, which can never occur in Afrikaans, orsê, which translates to "say", whereasseis a possessive form. The acute's (á,é,í,ó,ú, ý)primary function is to place emphasis on a word (i.e. for emphatic reasons), by adding it to the emphasised syllable of the word. For example,sál("will" (verb)),néé('no'),móét("must"),hý("he"),gewéét("knew"). The acute is only placed on theiif it is the only vowel in the emphasised word:wil('want' (verb)) becomeswíl, butlui('lazy') becomeslúi.Only a few non-loan words are spelled with acutes, e.g.dié('this'),ná('after'),óf ... óf('either ... or'),nóg ... nóg('neither ... nor'), etc. Only four non-loan words are spelled with the grave:nè('yes?', 'right?', 'eh?'),dè('here, take this!' or '[this is] yours!'),hè('huh?', 'what?', 'eh?'), andappèl('(formal) appeal' (noun)).
A few short words in Afrikaans take initial apostrophes. In modern Afrikaans, these words are always written in lower case (except if the entire line is uppercase), and if they occur at the beginning of a sentence, the next word is capitalised. Three examples of such apostrophed words are'k, 't, 'n. The last (the indefinite article) is the only apostrophed word that is common in modern written Afrikaans, since the other examples are shortened versions of other words (ekandhet, respectively) and are rarely found outside of a poetic context.
Here are a few examples:
The apostrophe and the following letter are regarded as two separate characters, and are never written using a single glyph, although a single character variant of the indefinite article appears in Unicode,ŉ.
For more on the pronunciation of the letters below, seeHelp:IPA/Afrikaans.
Psalm 231983 translation:
Psalm 231953 translation:
Lord's Prayer(Afrikaans New Living Version translation):
Lord's Prayer(Original translation):