In 1875, a group of Afrikaans-speakers from the Cape formed the Genootskap vir Regte Afrikaanders ("Society for Real Afrikaners"), and published a number of books in Afrikaans including grammars, dictionaries, religious materials and histories. 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). 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." īeginning 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. Valkhoff argued that 75% of children born to female slaves in the Dutch Cape Colony between 16 had a Dutch father. Many free and enslaved women married or cohabited with the male Dutch settlers. A number were also indigenous Khoisan people, who were valued as interpreters, domestic servants, and labourers. The slave population was made up of people from East Africa, West Africa, India, Madagascar, and the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia). Īfrican and Asian workers, Cape Coloured children of European settlers and Khoikhoi women, and slaves contributed to the development of Afrikaans. 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. Standard Dutch used in a 1916 South African newspaper before Afrikaans replaced it for use in media Afrikaans) as putatively beneath official Dutch standards included geradbraakt, gebroken and onbeschaafd Hollands ("mutilated/broken/uncivilised Dutch"), as well as verkeerd Nederlands ("incorrect Dutch"). Other early epithets setting apart Kaaps Hollands (" Cape Dutch", i.e. As early as the mid-18th century and as recently as the mid-20th century, Afrikaans was known in standard Dutch as a "kitchen language" (Afrikaans: kombuistaal), lacking the prestige accorded, for example, even by the educational system in Africa, to languages spoken outside Africa. The Afrikaans language arose in the Dutch Cape Colony, through a gradual divergence from European Dutch dialects, during the course of the 18th century. It was previously referred to as "Cape Dutch" ( Kaap-Hollands/ Kaap-Nederlands), a term also used to refer to the early Cape settlers collectively, or the derogatory "kitchen Dutch" ( kombuistaal) from its use by slaves of colonial settlers "in the kitchen". The name of the language comes directly from the Dutch word Afrikaansch (now spelled Afrikaans) meaning "African". It is the majority language of the western half of South Africa-the provinces of the Northern Cape and Western Cape-and the first language of 75.8% of Coloured South Africans (4.8 million people), 60.8% of White South Africans (2.7 million people), 1.5% of Black South Africans (600,000 people), and 4.6% of Indian South Africans (58,000 people). It has the widest geographic and racial distribution of the 11 official languages and is widely spoken and understood as a second or third language, although Zulu and English are estimated to be understood as a second language by a much larger proportion of the population. Ībout 13.5% of the South African population (7 million people) speak Afrikaans as a first language, making it the third most common natively-spoken language in the country, after Zulu and Xhosa. There is a large degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages, especially in written form. Differences with Dutch include a more analytic-type morphology and grammar, and some pronunciations. Obelisks of the Afrikaans Language Monument near PaarlĪn estimated 90 to 95% of the vocabulary is of Dutch origin, with adopted words from other languages including German and the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa.
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