The Afrikaans Language

Afrikaans is one of South Africa's eleven official languages and the only major Germanic language to have developed on the African continent. It grew out of the Dutch spoken by settlers at the Cape from the seventeenth century, evolving into a distinct language over several generations.

Spoken as a first language by a diverse community of millions across South Africa and Namibia, Afrikaans is particularly strong in the Western and Northern Cape. It has a rich literary tradition, a lively music scene, and a substantial presence in film, television, and print media.

For English speakers, Afrikaans is often considered one of the more approachable languages to learn, thanks to its simplified grammar and a vocabulary that shares many recognisable roots with English and Dutch.

Afrikaans developed from the Dutch of Cape settlers, but it was shaped profoundly by contact with Malay, Khoisan, Portuguese, and various African languages, absorbing vocabulary and grammatical simplifications along the way. For a long time it was regarded as a dialect of Dutch before being recognised as a language in its own right in the early twentieth century.

It became an official language of South Africa in 1925 and today, alongside its complex political history, it remains a vibrant, evolving language spoken across racial and cultural lines, with the majority of its speakers being people of colour.