Afrikaans

Categories: Pages containing IPA | Afrikaans | Low German languages | Languages of South Africa

Afrikaans (Afrikaans)
Spoken in:	South Africa, Namibia
Region:	Southern Africa
Total speakers:	Native speakers: 6,000,000+ Secondary speakers: 10,000,000+
Ranking:	not ranked
Genetic classification:	Indo-European Germanic West Low German Low Franconian Dutch Afrikaans
Official status
Official language of:	South Africa
Regulated by:	None
Language codes
ISO 639-1	af
ISO 639-2	afr
SIL	AFK
See also: Language – List of languages

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia. 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 language: Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie - VOC) 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, a few from Scotland, and various other countries. The indentured workers and slaves were Malays, and Malagasy in addition to the indigenous Khoi and Bushmen.

Research by J. A. Heese indicates that until 1807, 36.8% of the ancestors of the White Afrikaans speaking population were Dutch, 35% were German, 14.6% were French and 7.2% non-white (of African and/or Asian origins). Heese's figures are questioned by other researchers, however, and especially the non-white component quoted by Heese is very much in doubt.

A sizeable minority of those who spoke Afrikaans as a first language were not white. The dialect became known as "Cape Dutch". Later, Afrikaans was sometimes also referred to as "African Dutch" or "Kitchen Dutch". Afrikaans was considered a Dutch dialect until the early 20th century, when it began to be widely recognized as a distinct language, despite being more closely related to Dutch than most of the official dialects in the geographic area of the Netherlands. The name Afrikaans is simply the Dutch word for African, i.e. the African form of the Dutch language.

1 History
2 Grammar
3 Orthography
4 Comparison with Dutch, German and English
5 Sociolinguistics
6 Afrikaans phrases
7 Additional information
8 See also
9 Reference
10 External links

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History

Afrikaans is linguistically closely related to 17th century Dutch dialect spoken in North and South Holland, and to modern Dutch by extension. Speakers of each language can make themselves easily understood by speakers of the other. Other less closely related languages include the Low Saxon spoken in northern Germany and the Netherlands, German, and English. Cape Dutch vocabulary diverged from the Dutch vocabulary spoken in the Netherlands over time as Cape Dutch absorbed words from other European settlers, slaves from East India and Indonesia's Malay, and native African languages.

The linguist Paul Roberge suggests that the earliest 'truly "Afrikaans"' texts are doggerel verse from 1795 and a dialogue transcribed by a Dutch traveller in 1825. Printed material among the Afrikaners at first used only proper European Dutch. By the mid-19th century, more and more was appearing in Afrikaans, which was very much still regarded as a spoken regional dialect. The first Afrikaans grammars and dictionaries were published in 1875 by the Genootskap vir Regte Afrikaners (Society for Real Afrikaners) in Cape Town. Official government proclamation of Afrikaans as a distinct language from Dutch came in 1925. The official languages of the Union of South Africa were English and Dutch until that time. Dutch was replaced as an official language by Afrikaans.

Besides vocabulary, the most striking difference from Dutch is its much more regular grammar, which is likely the result of mutual interference with one or more creole languages based on the Dutch language spoken by the relatively large number of non-Dutch speakers (Khoisan, Khoikhoi, German, French, Cape Malay, and speakers of different African languages) during the formation period of the language in the second half of the 17th century. In 1710, slaves outnumbered free settlers, and the language was developing among speakers who had little occasion to write or analyse their new dialect.

There are a lot of different theories about how Afrikaans came to be. The Afrikaans School has long seen Afrikaans as a natural development from the South-Hollandic Dutch dialect, but has also only considered the Afrikaans as spoken by the whites. The Afrikaan School has also rejected all alternative ideas.

Most linguistics scholars today are certain that Afrikaans has been influenced by creole languages based on the South-Holland Dutch dialect. It is very hard to find out how this influence took place, since there is almost no material written in the Dutch-based creole languages: only a few sentences found in unrelated books often written by non-speakers.

Although much of the vocabulary of Afrikaans reflects its origins in 17th century South-Hollandic Dutch, it also contains words borrowed from Indonesian languages, Malay (the oldest known written Afrikaans uses Arabic script and was intended for use among Cape Town's Muslims), Portuguese, French, Khoi and San dialects, English, isiXhosa and many other languages. Consequently, many words in Afrikaans are very different from Dutch, as demonstrated by the names of different fruits:

AFRIKAANS	DUTCH	ENGLISH
piesang*	banaan	banana
lemoen	sinaasappel	orange
suurlemoen**	citroen	lemon

* from Malay pisang (a word that is known to the Dutch through their Dutch East Indies history)
** suur = sour (which is essentially the same as the Dutch word 'zuur').

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Grammar

See separate article on Afrikaans grammar.

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Orthography

Written Afrikaans differs from Dutch in that the spelling reflects a phonetically simplified language, and so many consonants are dropped (see also the grammar section for a description of how consonant dropping affects the morphology of Afrikaans adjectives and nouns). The spelling is also considerably more phonetical than the Dutch counterpart. A notable feature is the indefinite article, which, as noted in the grammar section, is "'n", not "een" as in Dutch. "A book" is "'n Boek", whereas in Dutch it would be "Een boek". (Note that "'n" is still allowed in Dutch; Afrikaans uses only "'n" where Dutch uses it next to "een". When letters are dropped an apostrophe is mandatory.) Other features include the use of 's' instead of 'z', hence South Africa in Afrikaans is written as Suid-Afrika, whereas in Dutch it is Zuid-Afrika. (This accounts for .za being used as South Africa's internet top level domain.) The Dutch letter 'IJ' is written as 'Y', except where it replaces the Dutch suffix -lijk, as in waarschijnlijk = waarskynlik. Intersting to note that the use of the hard "k" is analogous to the pronounciation in parts of Flanders, which was once part of the United Provinces, and from whence many an Afrikaner came.

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Comparison with Dutch, German and English

AFRIKAANS	DUTCH	GERMAN	ENGLISH
aksie	actie	Aktion	action
asseblief	alstublieft	bitte	please
bed	bed	Bett	bed
eggenoot	echtgenoot	Ehegatte	spouse
goeienaand	goedenavond	guten Abend	good evening
lughawe	luchthaven	Flughafen	airport
my	mijn	mein	my
maak	maak	machen	make
oes	oogst	Ernte	harvest
oop	open	offen	open
oormôre	overmorgen	übermorgen	the day after tomorrow (lit. "overmorrow")
saam	samen	zusammen	together (compare "same")
skool	school	Schule	school
sleg	slecht	schlecht	bad (compare "slight")
vir	voor	für	for
voël*	vogel*	Vogel	bird, fowl
vry	vrij	frei	free
vyf	vijf	fünf	five
waarskynlik	waarschijnlijk	wahrscheinlich	probably (Latin root)
winter	winter	Winter	winter
ys	ijs	Eis	ice

voël is also the West Flemish word for "bird".

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Sociolinguistics

Afrikaans is the first language of approximately 60% of South Africa's whites, and over 90% of the "Coloured" (mixed-race) population. Large numbers of black, Asian, and English-speaking whites also speak it as a second language.

It is also widely spoken in Namibia, where it has had constitutional recognition as a national, not official, language since independence in 1990. Prior to independence, Afrikaans, along with German, had equal status as an official language. There is a much smaller number of Afrikaans speakers among Zimbabwe's white minority, but most left the country in 1980.

Many South Africans living and working in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom are also Afrikaans speakers.

Afrikaans has been influential in the development of South African English. Many Afrikaans loanwords have found their way into South African English, such as "veld", "braai", "boomslang", and "lekker". A few words in standard English are derived from Afrikaans, such as "trek", "spoor", and, of course, apartheid.

In 1976, high school students in Soweto began the rebellion that contributed to the end of apartheid and the whites-only government of South Africa. This has been credited to that government's decision that Afrikaans rather than English be used as the language of instruction in non-White schools. However, many historians argue that the language issue was largely a smokescreen. Afrikaans is more widely spoken than English (and is, in fact, spoken by a majority of residents in two of South Africa's nine provinces), so most children may not have objected to the use of Afrikaans per se. Rather, it was the further directive, within the instructional language directive, that non-White (i.e., Black, Coloured and Indian) South African children be denied instruction in all but the most basic topics of mathematics, sciences, fine arts, etc., on the theory they would never need to know those subjects because they would never have occaision to use such an education. See History of South Africa.

Under South Africa's multiracial Constitution of 1994, Afrikaans remains an official language, but there are now nine other official languages, in addition to English, with which it has equal status. The new dispensation means that Afrikaans is often downgraded in favour of English, or to accommodate the other official languages. In 1996, for example, the South African Broadcasting Corporation reduced the amount of television airtime in Afrikaans, while South African Airways dropped its Afrikaans name Suid-Afrikaanse Lugdiens from its livery. Similarly, South Africa's diplomatic missions overseas now only display the name of the country in English and their host country's language, but not in Afrikaans.

Although these moves have angered Afrikaans speakers, the language has remained strong, with Afrikaans newspapers and magazines continuing to have wide circulations, and a pay-TV channel in Afrikaans called KykNet being launched in 1999 and an Afrikaans music channel, MK89, in 2005.

Although Afrikaans has diverged from Dutch over the past three centuries, it still shares 85 per cent of its vocabulary with that language, and Afrikaans speakers are able to learn Dutch within a comparatively short amount of time. Native Dutch pick up Afrikaans even more quickly, due to its simple grammar. This has enabled Dutch companies to outsource their call centre operations to South Africa, thereby taking advantage of lower labour costs.

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Afrikaans phrases

Note: This page contains
IPA phonetic symbols
in Unicode.

Afrikaans is a very centralized language, meaning that most of the vowels are pronounced in a very centralized (i.e. very schwa-like) way. There are a lot of different dialects and different pronunciations — but the transcription should be fairly standard.

Hallo! Hoe gaan dit? [ɦaləu ɦu xaˑn dət] Hello! How are you?
Baie goed, dankie. [bajə xuˑt danki] Very good, thanks.
Praat jy Afrikaans? [prɑˑt jəi afrikɑˑns] Do you speak Afrikaans?
Praat jy Engels? [prɑˑt jəi ɛŋəls] Do you speak English?
Ja. [jɑˑ] Yes.
Nee. [neˑə] No.
'n Bietjie. [ə biki] A little.
Wat is jou naam? [vat əs jəu nɑˑm] What is your name?
Die kinders praat Afrikaans [di kənərs prɑˑt afrikɑˑns] The children speak Afrikaans.

Two sentences that are written the same in Afrikaans as in English:

My pen was in my hand ([məi pɛn vas ən məi hɑnt]) My pen was in my hand.

My hand is in warm water. ([məi hɑnt əs ən varəm vɑˑtər]) My hand is in warm water.

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Additional information

Afrikaans is the only language that has a monument erected to it. The Afrikaans Language Monument ("Afrikaanse Taalmonument") is located near the Western Cape Province town of Paarl.
The letters c, q and x are rarely seen in Afrikaans, and words containing them are almost exclusively borrowings from English, Greek or Latin. This is usually because words with c or ch in Dutch are transliterated as k or g in Afrikaans.
Special letters used are è, é, ê, ë, î, ï, ô, û. Sometimes ŉ is considered a single character.

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Reference

Roberge, P. T., 2002. Afrikaans - considering origins, in Language in South Africa, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom. ISBN 0-521-53383-X

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