Afrikaans


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 evolved from the Dutch vernacular of South Holland spoken by the predominantly Dutch settlers and enslaved population of the Dutch Cape Colony, where it gradually began to develop distinguishing characteristics in the 17th and 18th centuries.
File:AfrikaanseTaalmonumentObelisks.jpg|thumb|Obelisks of the Afrikaans Language Monument near Paarl
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 Afrikaansch meaning 'African'. It was previously called 'Cape Dutch', 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

The Afrikaans language arose in the Dutch Cape Colony through a gradual divergence from European Dutch dialects during the 18th century. As early as the mid-18th century and as recently as the early-20th century, many in Southern Africa viewed pre-standardized Afrikaans as 'kitchen Dutch', lacking the prestige accorded an officially recognised language like standard Dutch and English. In the 19th-century Boer republics, proto-Afrikaans was not yet widely seen by the Afrikaner population or its leaders as a separate language from standard Dutch. Dutch was expressly the sole and only legally recognised language at that time. Other early epithets in Southern Africa setting apart Kaaps Hollands as putatively beneath official Dutch language standards included geradbraakt, gebroken and onbeschaafd Hollands, as well as verkeerd Nederlands.
Historical linguist Hans den Besten theorises that modern Standard Afrikaans derives from two sources:
  • Cape Dutch, a direct transplantation of European Dutch to Southern Africa, and
  • 'Hottentot Dutch', a pidgin that descended from 'Foreigner Talk' and ultimately from the Dutch pidgin spoken by slaves, via hypothetical Dutch-based creole languages.
So Afrikaans, in his view, is neither a creole nor a direct descendant of Dutch, but a fusion of two transmission pathways.

Development

Most of the first settlers whose descendants today are the Afrikaners were from the United Provinces, 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. 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 with the Arabic alphabet: see Arabic Afrikaans. Later, Afrikaans, now written with the Latin script, started to appear in newspapers and political and religious works in around 1850.
In 1875 a group of Afrikaans-speakers from the Cape formed the Genootskap van Regte 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 Zamenspraak tusschen Klaas Waarzegger en Jan Twyfelaar, 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 Verklarende Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal. A new authoritative dictionary, Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal, was under development The official orthography of Afrikaans is the Afrikaanse Woordelys en Spelreëls, compiled by Die Taalkommissie.

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 Statenbijbel. Before this, most Cape Dutch-Afrikaans speakers had to rely on the Dutch Statenbijbel. This Statenvertaling 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 Evangelie volgens Markus, 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 'n suiwer en ordentlike taal—"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.
In 1983 a fresh translation marked the 50th anniversary of the 1933 version. It was edited by E. P. Groenewald, A. H. van Zyl, P. A. Verhoef, J. L. Helberg and W. Kempen. It was influenced by Eugene Nida's theory of dynamic equivalence, which focused on finding the nearest equivalent in the receptor language to the idea that the Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic conveyed.
A new translation, Die Bybel: 'n Direkte Vertaling was released in November 2020. It is the first truly ecumenical translation of the Bible in Afrikaans as translators from various churches, including the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, were involved.

Classification

Afrikaans descended from Dutch dialects in the 17th century. It belongs to a West Germanic sub-group, the Low Franconian languages. Other West Germanic languages related to Afrikaans are German, English, the Frisian languages, Yiddish, and the unstandardised language Low German.

Geographic distribution

Statistics

CountrySpeakersPercentage of speakersYearReference
South AfricaCitation needed|date=March 2024

Sociolinguistics

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 in Bophuthatswana, an Apartheid-era Bantustan. Eldoret, Kenya, was founded by Afrikaners.
There are also around 30,000 South-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 the Dutch Caribbean.
Contrary to popular belief, the majority of Afrikaans speakers today are not Afrikaners or Boers, but Coloureds.
In 1976, secondary-school pupils in Soweto began a rebellion in response to the government's decision that Afrikaans be used as the language of instruction for half the subjects taught in non-White schools. Although English is the mother tongue of only 8.2% of the population, it is the language most widely understood, and the second language of 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 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.
Under South Africa's Constitution of 1996, Afrikaans remains an official 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, 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 display the name of the country only in English and their host country's language, and not in Afrikaans. Meanwhile, the constitution of the Western Cape, which went into effect in 1998, declares Afrikaans to be an official language of the province alongside English and Xhosa.
The Afrikaans-language general-interest family magazine Huisgenoot has the largest readership of any magazine in the country.
When the British design magazine Wallpaper described Afrikaans as "one of the world's ugliest languages" in its September 2005 article about the monument, South African billionaire Johann Rupert, responded by withdrawing advertising for brands such as Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Montblanc and Alfred Dunhill from the magazine. The author of the article, Bronwyn Davies, was an English-speaking South African.