Menu
Afrikaans
Last update: Saturday 11th of February 2012
Nothing was found!
| Afrikaans | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | South Africa and Namibia | |
| Region: | Southern Africa | |
| Total speakers: | 16 million + | |
| Language family: | Indo-European Germanic West Germanic Low Franconian Afrikaans | |
| Official status | ||
| Official language of: |  South Africa | |
| Regulated by: | Die Taalkommissie (The Language Commission of the South African Academy for Science and Arts) | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | af | |
| ISO 639-2: | afr | |
| ISO 639-3: | afr | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Afrikaans is a Low Franconian language mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia with smaller numbers of speakers in Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Zambia. Due to emigration and migrant labour, there are possibly over 100 000 Afrikaans speakers in the United Kingdom, with other substantial communities found in Brussels, Belgium; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Perth, Australia; Toronto, Canada; and Auckland, New Zealand. It is the primary language used by two related ethnic groups in South Africa: the Afrikaners and the Coloureds or kleurlinge/bruinmense (including Basters, Cape Malays and Griqua). It is also spoken as a first language by many Tswana people in South Africa's North West Province.
A term sometimes used in the Afrikaans media as a collective term for people who speak Afrikaans, irrespective of ethnic origin, is Afrikaanses .
Geographically, the Afrikaans language is the majority language of the western one-third of South Africa (Northern and Western Cape, spoken at home by 69% and 58%, respectively). It is also the largest first language in the adjacent southern one-third of Namibia (Hardap and Karas, where it is the first language of 43% and 41%, respectively). It is the most widely used second language throughout both of these countries for the population as a whole, although the younger generation has better proficiency in English.
Afrikaans originated from the Dutch language. The dialect became known as "Cape Dutch". Later, Afrikaans was sometimes also referred to as "African Dutch" or "Kitchen Dutch", although these terms were mainly pejorative. Afrikaans was considered a Dutch dialect until the late 19th century, when it began to be recognised as a distinct language, and it gained equal status with Dutch and English as an official language in South Africa in 1925. Dutch remained an official language until the new 1961 constitution finally stipulated the two official languages in South Africa to be Afrikaans and English (although, curiously, the 1961 constitution still had a sub-clause stipulating that the word "Afrikaans" was also meant to be referring to the Dutch language).
There are basically three dialects, of which the northeastern variant (which developed into a literary language in the Transvaal) forms the basis of the written standard. Within the Dutch-speaking zones of the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname, there is greater divergence among the dialects than there is between standard Dutch and standard Afrikaans. Although Afrikaans knows some typical Hollandic tones, there particularly exist striking similarities between Afrikaans and Zeeuws (the dialect of the Zeeland province of the Netherlands which has also similarities with West Flemish). Zeeland is a coastal province of the Netherlands and most of the Dutch spoken in former Dutch colonies is very much influenced by Zeeuws/the Zeeland dialect as many people from Zeeland were involved in The Netherlands' emperial/colonial expansion.
It was originally the dialect that developed among the Afrikaner Protestant settlers and the indentured or slave workforce brought to the Cape area in southwestern South Africa by the Dutch East India Company (Dutch: Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie — VOC, Afrikaans: Nederlandse Oos-Indiese Kompanjie - NOIK) between 1652 and 1705. A relative majority of these first settlers were from the United Provinces (now Netherlands), though there were also many from Germany, a considerable number from France, and some from Norway, Portugal, Scotland, and various other countries. The indentured workers and slaves were South Indians, Malays, and Malagasy in addition to the indigenous Khoi and Bushmen.