Afrikaans is a West Germanic language spoken in South Africa, Namibia, and to a lesser extent Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and also Argentina, where a group in Sarmiento speaks a Patagonian dialect. It emerged during the late 19th century as a fusion of Dutch dialects (mainly Hollandic and Zeelandic) spoken by the Dutch settlers in South Africa since the 17th century and the Dutch-based creole languages spoken by the Khoisan, Nguni and Coloured peoples.K. Pithouse, C. Mitchell, R. Moletsane, Making Connections: Self-Study & Social Action, p.91Herkomst en groei van het Afrikaans – G.G. Kloeke (1950)
Afrikaans is the third most spoken home language in South Africa, out of the country's 12 official languages. In 1996 it was spoken by 14.5% of the population, an estimated 5.9 million people. By 2022 that had fallen to 10.6% (6.3 million people), with Afrikaans gaining roughly 480,000 speakers overall. Although Afrikaans has adopted words from other languages, including German, Malay, and Khoisan languages, an estimated 90 to 95% of its vocabulary is of Dutch origin. Differences between Afrikaans and Dutch often lie in the more analytic morphology and grammar of Afrikaans, and different spellings. There is a large degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages, especially in written form.
Etymology
The language's name comes directly from the Dutch word (now spelled ) meaning 'African'. It was previously called 'Cape Dutch' ( or ), a term also used to refer to the early Cape settlers collectively, or the derogatory 'kitchen Dutch' () from its use by slaves of colonial settlers "in the kitchen".
History
Origin For a long time, the so-called Eastern Border Hypothesis of the South African linguist Prof. Dr. (1938–2018) was regarded as the scientific consensus explaining the development and standardization of Afrikaans. According to this hypothesis, the Dutch dialect spoken on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony was to be seen as a direct and natural development of the Dutch dialects (particularly Hollandic and Zeelandic varieties) spoken by the Trekboers, while the two other major dialects, Kaaps and Orange River Afrikaans, were considered to have undergone substantial creolization. This was attributed to the fact that, in these regions, a significant proportion of speakers had acquired Dutch not as their first language but as a second language. According to Van Rensburg, Eastern Border Afrikaans developed around 1775 into a stable and comparatively homogeneous Dutch dialect form, which became increasingly standardized and written down during the 19th century; particularly in the period after 1806–1820, when European Dutch began being replaced by English as the official and administrative language.M.C.J. Van Rensburg: Soorte Afrikaans in: T.J.R. Botha: Inleiding tot die Afrikaanse Taalkunde. Pretoria, Academica, 1989, p. 436–467.H.P. Grebe: De taal is gans het volk - taalstandaardisatie en de constructie van identiteit, in: Internationale Neerlandistiek. Volume 47. Rozenberg Publishers, Amsterdam, 2009, p. 21–34
More recent research, however, has concluded that the development of Afrikaans was considerably more complex than this and Afrikaans appears to have developed considerably more gradually and diversely than originally assumed. Instead of a single more or less unified dialect developing into a standardized language over the course of the 19th century, South Africa was characterized by a highly diverse linguistic landscape until the early twentieth century, with language communities ranging from some in which Dutch was used in schools and at home, differring little, if at all, from contemporary Dutch in Europe, to communities (often consisting of black, mixed or non-Dutch European immigrants) for whom Dutch was a second or even third language. These speech communities were interconnected through highly complex patterns of linguistic and social interaction, with the choice and use of a particular varieties depending on language proficiency and sociolinguistic factors such as social class, ethnicity, and race.A. Deumert: Language standardization and language change: the dynamics of Cape Dutch. Amsterdam, Benjamins Publishing, 2004, p. 64–78
In the late eighteenth century, a written tradition emerged that made conspicuous use of features associated with these highly diverse South African dialects and sociolects. The earliest deliberate imitation of colloquial speech, dating from 1795, is found in the anonymous poem Gedicht Lied ter eere van de Swellendamsche en diverse andere helden bij de bloedige actie aan Muizenberg (“Song in honor of the heroes of Swellendam and various other heroes at the bloody Battle of Muizenberg”), which mocks the inhabitants of Swellendam. During the following century, this developed into a distinctive writing tradition, in which Dutch texts increasingly incorporated stereotypical features of the various non-standard varieties spoken in South Africa. This use of local vernacular, much of which was considered rustic, colonial or uncouth by the Dutch and Cape Dutch of the time period, became increasingly deliberate and became closely associated with broader processes of social identity formation, in which the Boers increasingly asserted a distinct identity from both the British and the Dutch-speaking urban population of Cape Town.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the codification and institutionalization of Afrikaans accelerated considerably. In 1875, the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners was founded with the explicit aim of establishing spoken Afrikaans as a written language. Dutch spelling reforms promoted and proposed in 1891 by the Dutch linguist Roeland Kollewijn, with its emphasis on phonetic spelling, were generally regarded in the Netherlands and Belgium as being “too modernistic” or even “demeaning.” In South Africa, by contrast, Kollewijn’s Vereenvoudigde Nederlandse spelling (“Simplified Dutch Spelling”) was seen as bridging the increasing gap between the written and spoken language and adopted in 1905 as the official orthography of the Dutch language in South Africa and subsequently served as the basis for modern Afrikaans orthography.
Development
Most of the first settlers whose descendants today are the Afrikaners were from the United Provinces (now Netherlands), with up to one-sixth of the community of French Huguenot origin, and a seventh from Germany.
African and Asian workers, Cape Coloured children of European settlers and Khoikhoi women, and slaves contributed to the development of Afrikaans. The slave population comprised people from East Africa, West Africa, Mughal India, Madagascar, and the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia). Many were also indigenous Khoisan people, who were valued as interpreters, domestic servants, and labourers. Many free and enslaved women married or cohabited with 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 replace Malay as the language of instruction in Muslim schools in South Africa, written in Arabic Afrikaans. These are the earliest known works written in Afrikaans, at a time when Standard Dutch was the main written language. Later, Afrikaans, now written with the Latin 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 the ('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 a Dutch dialect, alongside Standard Dutch, which it eventually replaced as an official language. Before the Boer 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."
Recognition
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, 23 years after the Second Boer War ended, the Official Languages of the Union Act, 1925 was passed—mostly due to the efforts of the Afrikaans language movement—at a joint sitting of the House of Assembly and the Senate, in which the Afrikaans language was declared a variety of Dutch. The Constitution of 1961 reversed the position of Afrikaans and Dutch, so that English and Afrikaans were the official languages and Afrikaans was deemed to include Dutch. The Constitution of 1983 removed any mention of Dutch altogether.
The Afrikaans Language Monument is on a hill overlooking Paarl in the Western Cape Province. Officially opened on 10 October 1975, it was erected on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Society of Real Afrikaners, and the 50th anniversary of Afrikaans being declared an official language of South Africa in distinction to Dutch.
Standardisation
The earliest Afrikaans texts were some doggerel verses from 1795 and a dialogue transcribed by a Dutch traveller in 1825. Afrikaans used the Latin alphabet around this time, although the Cape Muslim community used the Arabic script. In 1861, L. H. Meurant published his (Conversation between Nicholas Truthsayer and John Doubter), which is considered the first book published in Afrikaans.
The first grammar book was published in 1876; a bilingual dictionary was published in 1902. The main modern Afrikaans dictionary in use is the (HAT). A new authoritative dictionary, (WAT), was under development The official orthography of Afrikaans is the , compiled by .
The Afrikaans Bible
The Afrikaners primarily were Protestants, of the Dutch Reformed Church of the 17th century. Their religious practices were later influenced in South Africa by British ministries during the 1800s. A landmark in the language's development was the translation of the Bible into Afrikaans. While significant advances had been made in the textual criticism of the Bible, especially the Greek New Testament, the 1933 translation followed the Textus Receptus and was closely akin to the . Before this, most Cape Dutch-Afrikaans speakers had to rely on the Dutch . This had its origins with the Synod of Dordrecht of 1618 and was thus in an archaic form of Dutch. This was hard for Dutch speakers to understand, and increasingly unintelligible for Afrikaans speakers.
C. P. Hoogehout, Arnoldus Pannevis, and Stephanus Jacobus du Toit were the first Afrikaans Bible translators. An important landmark in the translation of the Scriptures as C. P. Hoogehout's 1878 translation of the (Gospel of Mark, lit. 'Gospel according to Mark'), but it was never published. The manuscript is in the South African National Library, Cape Town.
The first official translation of the entire Bible into Afrikaans was in 1933 by J. D. du Toit, E. E. van Rooyen, J. D. Kestell, H. C. M. Fourie, and BB Keet. This monumental work established Afrikaans as —"a pure and proper language" for religious purposes, especially among the deeply Calvinist Afrikaans religious community that previously had been sceptical of a Bible translation that varied from the Dutch version they were used to.