Afrikaans - Grammar, Orthography, Comparison with Dutch, German and English, Sociolinguistics

South African or Cape Dutch, the language of Dutch colonization, and a variety of West Germanic, but with many loan words from Bantu and other languages. It became a written language in the late 19th-c. In the Namaland region of SW Africa, there is an Afrikaans-based pidgin used in communication between tribesmen and Afrikaners.

Portions of the summary below have been contributed by Wikipedia.

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/FDIS 639-3:	afr

Look up Wiktionary:Swadesh lists for Afrikaans and Dutch in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. 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).

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. The official languages of the Union of South Africa were English and Dutch until Afrikaans was subsumed under Dutch on 5 May 1925.

Difference between Dutch and Afrikaans

Besides vocabulary, the most striking difference between Dutch and Afrikaans is its much more regular grammar, which is likely the result of extensive contact with one or more creole languages based on the Dutch language spoken by the relatively large number of non-Dutch speakers (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. 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.

Although much of the vocabulary of Afrikaans reflects its origins in 17th century South Hollandic Dutch, it also contains words borrowed from Asian Malay (one of the oldest known Afrikaans texts used Arabic script; Consequently, many words in Afrikaans are very different from Dutch, as demonstrated by the names of different fruits:

Afrikaans	Dutch	English
piesang*	banaan	banana
pynappel	ananas	pineapple
lemoen	sinaasappel	orange
suurlemoen**	citroen	lemon

* from Malay pisang (via Dutch East Indies history), Piesang is also used in The Netherlands and Indonesia.
** suur = sour (which is essentially the same as the Dutch word 'zuur').

Grammar

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).

Comparison with Dutch, German and English

Afrikaans	Dutch	German	English
ag(t)	acht	acht	eight
aksie	actie/aktie	Aktion	action
asseblief	alstublieft/alsjeblieft (lit. "als het u/je belieft)	bitte (Afrikaans lit. = "als es dir beliebt")	please (lit. "if it pleases you" - compare archaic "lief")
bed	bed	Bett	bed
dankie	dank je/dank u	danke	thank you
eggenoot	echtgenoot	Ehegatte (lit. "Ehegenosse")	spouse (Latin root)
goeienaand	goedenavond goeienavond	guten Abend	good evening
lughawe	luchthaven vliegveld	Flughafen	airport (Latinate root)
my	mij/mijn	mein	my
maak	maak	machen	make
nege	negen	neun	nine
oes	oogst	Ernte (Herbst=autumn)	harvest
oop	open	offen	open
oormôre	overmorgen	übermorgen	the day after tomorrow (lit. "overmorrow")
reën	regen	regen	rain
saam	tesamen/samen	zusammen	together (compare "same")
ses	zes	sechs	six
sewe	zeven	sieben	seven
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	likely (alternate root), probably (Latin root)
winter	winter	Winter	winter
ys	ijs	Eis	ice

Sociolinguistics

Afrikaans is the first language of approximately 60% of South Africa's Whites, and over 90% of the "Coloured" (mixed-race) population. A few words in standard English are derived from Afrikaans, such as "trek" ("pioneering journey", in Afrikaans lit."pull" but used also for "migrate"), "spoor" ("animal track"), "veld" ("Southern African grassland" in Afrikaans lit.

Although Afrikaans has diverged from Dutch over the past three centuries, it still shares approximately 85 per cent of its vocabulary with that language, and Afrikaans speakers are able to learn Dutch within a comparatively short period of time.

International view of Afrikaans

Outside of South Africa, there is a growing interest in the Afrikaans language, and it is currently taught at universities in Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Poland, Russia and Uzbekistan.

An interesting sentence having the same meaning and written (but not pronounced) identically in Afrikaans and English is:

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

Similarly the sentence:

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

has almost identical meaning in Afrikaans and English although the Afrikaans warm corresponds more closely in meaning to English hot and Dutch heet (Dutch warm corresponds to English warm, but is closer to Afrikaans in pronunciation). This is usually because words which had c and ch in the original Dutch are spelt with k and g repectively in Afrikaans (in many dialects of Dutch (including the Hollandic ones), a ch is spoken as a g, which explains the use of the g in Afrikaans language). English to Afrikaans from wordgumbo.com English to Afrikaans from xyzhomepage.com Afrikaans-English-Afrikaans Online Dictionary, www.majstro.com English to Afrikaans English to Afrikaans online dictionary

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