Afrikaans

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch-controlled Cape of Good Hope colony in what is now South Africa. It descended from the seventeenth-century Dutch vernacular spoken by European colonists in the Cape of Good Hope, evolving into a distinct tongue during the eighteenth century.

The language of Afrikaans bears many similarities to Dutch, and the two languages display high levels of mutual intelligibility, particularly in their written forms. However, Afrikaans also shows its own defining characteristics, including a unique sound system and formal features that depart from Standard Dutch in notable ways. Afrikaans also displays multiple influences specific to the Cape of Good Hope settlement, which derive from local Indigenous languages and variants of Malay and Portuguese spoken by the seafarers and merchants who frequented the region in its colonial past.

During South Africa’s twentieth-century apartheid era, Afrikaans was strongly associated with the country’s ruling White racial class. Its continued status as an official language in post-apartheid South Africa remains a point of cultural and political contention.

Brief History

From a linguistic standpoint, Afrikaans is a relatively young language. Its origins are rooted in the Cape of Good Hope colony, also known simply as the Cape Colony, which was established by Dutch seafarers in the mid-seventeenth century.

The Cape Colony began as a trading post operated and administered by the Dutch East India Company. It initially served as a service point where merchant ships traveling between India and the Netherlands could stop for supplies and repairs. As the colony grew, it began to attract permanent residents not only from the Netherlands, but also from other European source countries including Portugal, Germany, and France. As agriculture developed in the Cape Colony, enslaved people were imported to work on its farms as its Dutch administrators attempted to maintain mutually beneficial barter-based relations with local Indigenous populations. Many of these enslaved individuals came from the islands of Malay in what is now Indonesia.

As these ethnically and linguistically diverse groups interacted, the Dutch vernacular that served as the Cape Colony’s lingua franca began to evolve as the dual result of linguistic and cultural separation from its European motherland. During the eighteenth century, this linguistic evolution yielded the origins of Afrikaans. Most linguists consider Afrikaans a creole language, with the linguistic term “creole” describing any language that develops from the simplified, mixed forms of multiple source languages. Notably, a minority of experts continue to contend that Afrikaans retains too many Dutch structural, syntactic, and vocabulary characteristics for it to be properly considered a creole tongue.

Afrikaans continued to evolve over the course of the nineteenth century, developing standardized vocabulary and a distinct set of grammar rules. It remained strongly rooted in its Dutch origins but also absorbed influences from other European and non-European languages including Portuguese, Malay, and the Khoisan and Narrow Bantu languages native to southern Africa. Afrikaans also came to be associated with Afrikaners, a southern African population group descended primarily from White Western European colonists. Considered a dialect of Dutch for much of its history, Afrikaans was officially recognized as a distinct language in 1925.

Overview

Afrikaans, sometimes called Cape Dutch, is classified as a West Germanic language. This places it in the same linguistic family as multiple widely spoken modern European languages including English, Dutch, and German. Its vocabulary is dominated by words of Dutch origin, with some estimates suggesting that 90 to 95 percent of Afrikaans words descended directly from counterparts in Standard Dutch. However, other experts believe that this characterization minimizes and overlooks the rich, interconnected tapestry of influences that shaped the origins, evolution, and character of contemporary Afrikaans. Modern Afrikaans has also undergone significant levels of anglicization, due to a combination of the global status of English as a widely spoken tongue and high local levels of Afrikaans-English bilingualism. Great Britain took control of the Cape Colony from the Dutch East India Company in 1806, establishing its colonial administration in what is now South Africa and instituting English as a primary language.

Structurally, Afrikaans has a complex vowel system that includes both short and long vowels at a basic level, along with rounded and unrounded front, central, and back vowels, and multiple diphthongs. In these respects, it retains many characteristics of its Dutch sources. Its consonants include fricatives, laterals, nasals, and trills, which are pronounced using bilabial, labiodental, alveolar, velar, and glottal articulations. Afrikaans is written using a standard Latin alphabet consisting of the same twenty-six letters used in English. However, multiple consonants including C, Q, X, and Z are reserved almost entirely for writing words with foreign origins and only rarely appear in words native to Afrikaans. In spoken Afrikaans, emphasis usually falls on the first syllable in multisyllabic words.

Strong similarities between Afrikaans and Dutch extend to syntax, with the languages sharing many common grammatical features. Afrikaans uses the word dieas as its definite article (equivalent to the English “the”) and ‘nas as its indefinite article (equivalent to the English “a” or “an”). Nouns are expressed in both singular and plural forms but do not contain gender or case markings. This represents one major departure between Afrikaans and Dutch, with the latter marking nouns for both gender and case.

Afrikaans also displays distinctive characteristics in its use of verbs. The language does not distinguish between verb forms when using present-tense and infinitive verbs, and the conjugated forms of verbs do not change when they are attached to different subjects in the present tense. For example, conjugated forms of the verb “to be” change with different subjects in English: “I am,” “you are,” and “he/she is.” This does not happen in Afrikaans, which presents “I am” as ek is, “you are” as jy is, “he/she is” as hy/sy is, and so on. Simple past-tense constructions are usually made using het (“have”) as an auxiliary verb, while their simple future-tense counterparts are formed using sal (“will”) as the auxiliary.

Modern English contains numerous words of Afrikaans origin. Many of these words entered English as the result of Great Britain’s colonial administration of the Cape Colony and subsequent ruling presence in South Africa. Examples include aardvark, apartheid, commandeer, commando, trek, and wildebeest.

Topic Today

Afrikaans is one twelve languages recognized as official in South Africa. Though Afrikaans is also spoken by populations of various sizes in Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe, South Africa is the only country in the world in which it holds official status. In Namibia, Afrikaans is a recognized national language but not an official language. Afrikaans is spoken as a first language by approximately 7 million people worldwide, with about 10.3 million commanding it to varying degrees of proficiency as a second language. Estimates from the early 2020s suggest that it is the mother tongue of around 13.5 percent of South Africa’s population. In South Africa and other destinations where it is prevalent, Afrikaans is mainly spoken by Afrikaners—African people of White, European racial origin. Black populations in countries where Afrikaans is spoken often speak other languages, such as Zulu, Tswana, or Xhosa, though many also speak Afrikaans and English in the twenty-first century.

One explanation for the language’s historical confinement to White speakers is rooted in the role that Afrikaans played in the culture and politics of South Africa’s apartheid era. For most of the second half of the twentieth century, South African society was segregated along racial lines, with an elite and a ruling White class primarily occupying the country’s cities and most productive agricultural regions and a subjugated Black population mainly relegated to impoverished townships and inferior farmlands. Afrikaans played a key role in maintaining the apartheid system, serving as the language of White institutions and functioning as a barrier to Black participation in civics, education, commerce, and governance.

Though a point of contention, Afrikaans retained official status within South Africa when the country’s apartheid era ended in the early 1990s, and the nation adopted a new constitution. It has since come to be viewed by some as a relic of the country’s unjust and racist colonial and postcolonial past, especially among the racialized populations most heavily impacted by apartheid-era policy and its enduring legacy. Others view it as an essential element of persistent Afrikaner nationalism within South Africa, noting that it continues to be used as a tool of exclusion and racist oppression.

Addressing these concerns in the interests of maintaining social cohesion in post-apartheid South Africa, many of the institutions that historically used Afrikaans as their language of operation have adopted language reforms. For example, newly instituted government language policies forced the University of Stellenbosch to end its traditional practice of using Afrikaans as its language of instruction in favor of English. The university challenged the policy in court, with the High Court of South Africa ruling against the school in October 2019 by stating that the school’s desire to maintain its Afrikaans language policy constitutes the functional and illegal exclusion of Black students.

As a result of ongoing cultural and political reform, the prestige of the Afrikaans language began waning in the twenty-first century, and its use began declining in South Africa and adjacent areas. Some experts believe that a failure to reverse these trends of decline could eventually endanger the language's survival.

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