Afrikaans

Afrikaans, one of the 11 official languages of South Africa. Afrikaans, or Cape Dutch, is principally derived from the Zuid-Holland (South Holland) dialect of mid-17th-century Dutch settlers in South Africa. It gained loanwords (words adapted from other languages) from English, French, and German (through settlers) and from African languages and underwent grammatical simplification (for example, verb tense endings were dropped). Phonetic changes also occurred: sch- became sk- (Dutch schoen; Afrik. skoen,”shoes”), the final t was lost after some consonants, and so forth. Until the mid-19th century Afrikaans was a spoken language only; Standard Dutch was used for writing. A movement then arose to make Afrikaans a literary language. It was gradually used in newspapers, schools, and churches, and in 1925 it officially replaced Standard Dutch.