Afrikaans

Where it’s spoken

Afrikaans is the third-most-spoken first language in South Africa, after Zulu and Xhosa, with about 7 million native speakers across all ethnic groups. The Western Cape and Northern Cape have Afrikaans-majority populations. In Namibia it is a national language and widely used as a lingua franca. Speaker communities are concentrated among White Afrikaners and the Coloured (mixed-race) population.

What it sounds like

Afrikaans simplified Dutch grammar dramatically: it dropped grammatical gender and verb conjugation by person, has only two tenses formed analytically, and replaced Dutch’s complex spelling with a cleaner phonemic orthography. Sounds include the velar fricative “g,” front rounded “u” (like German ü), and a stable inventory closer to colloquial 17th-century Dutch.

How it’s written

Afrikaans uses 26 Latin letters and shares Dutch vowel digraphs but with several distinctive simplifications. It standardized in 1925 as a separate written language from Dutch.

History

Afrikaans evolved from the Dutch spoken by 17th-century settlers and was shaped by contact with Khoekhoe, Malay, and Bantu languages. Initially called Cape Dutch, it gained literary status in the late 19th century and became official alongside English in 1925.