Is Afrikaans a dialect of Dutch?

Afrikaans and English are the only Indo-European languages among the many official languages of South Africa. Although Afrikaans is very similar to Dutch, it is clearly a separate language, differing from Standard Dutch in its sound system and its loss of case and gender distinctions.

Can someone who speaks Dutch understand Afrikaans?

Although Afrikaans is a daughter of Dutch, Dutch speakers might take some time to understand the language but they can understand Afrikaans. One of the major differences between the two languages lies in grammar and morphology of Afrikaans. The spelling is also different from the Dutch standard.

How many dialects of Afrikaans are there?

Three dialects are generally identified: Cape Afrikaans was influenced by the language of Malay slaves who were brought in to work on sugar plantations and who spoke a Portuguese-based pidgin. Orange River Afrikaans was influenced by the neighboring Khoi languages.

Is Afrikaans mutually intelligible with Dutch?

There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages, particularly in written form. Mutual intelligibility tends to be asymmetrical, as it is easier for Dutch speakers to understand Afrikaans than for Afrikaans speakers to understand Dutch.

What language is similar to Afrikaans?

Dutch
Afrikaans descended from Dutch dialects in the 17th century. It belongs to a West Germanic sub-group, the Low Franconian languages. Other West Germanic languages related to Afrikaans are German, English, the Frisian languages, and the unstandardised languages Low German and Yiddish.

When was the Afrikaans language declared a variety of Dutch?

On 8 May 1925, twenty-three years after the Second Boer War ended, the Official Languages of the Union Act of 1925 was passed—mostly due to the efforts of the Afrikaans language movement —at a joint sitting of the House of Assembly and the Senate, in which the Afrikaans language was declared a variety of Dutch.

Is Afrikaans a white/colonial or African language?

Afrikaans: A White/colonial or African language? Afrikaans is the third most spoken language in South Africa. [11] Jansen argues that the language can be regarded as a unique ‘African-Germanic’ language: it did not originate within European borders and it ‘is spoken primarily in Africa’.

Is Afrikaans South Africa’s language of the Conqueror or the oppressed?

Therefore, Afrikaans occupies a somewhat awkward place in South Africa’s linguistic historiography, it ‘is at once the language of the conqueror and the language of the oppressed’. [9]

What is the most widely spoken language in South Africa?

Although English is the mother tongue of only 8.2\% of the population, it is the language most widely understood, and the second language of a majority of South Africans. Afrikaans is more widely spoken than English in the Northern and Western Cape provinces, several hundred kilometres from Soweto.