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Afrikaans is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia. It was originally the dialect that developed among the Afrikaner Calvinist settlers and the indentured or slave workforce brought to the Cape area in southwestern South Africa by the Dutch East India Company (NL: Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie - VOC) between 1652Events April 6 Dutch sailor Jan van Riebeeck establishes a resupply camp for the Dutch East India Company at the Cape of Good Hope, and founded Cape Town. May 18 Rhode Island passes the first law in North America making slavery illegal. May 29 First Anglo and 1705Events Construction begins on Blenheim Palace, in Oxfordshire, England. It is completed in 1724 The Sophia Naturalization Act 1705 is passed by the English Parliament, which naturalized Sophia of Hanover and the "issue of her body" as British subjects.. A relative majority of these settlers were from the NetherlandsDutch redirects here. For other uses, see Dutch (disambiguation). The Netherlands ( Dutch: Nederland is the European part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, a constitutional monarchy. It is located in northwestern Europe and borders the North Sea, Belgium, though there were also many from GermanyThe Federal Republic of Germany ( German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland is one of the world's leading industrialized countries, located in the middle of the European Union. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark and the Baltic Sea, to the east, a considerable number from FranceThe French Republic or France ( French: Republique francaise or France is a country whose metropolitan territory is located in western Europe, and which is further made up of a collection of overseas islands and territories located in other continents., a few from Scotland, and various other countries. The indentured workers and slaves were Malays and the indigenous Khoi and San.
Research by J. A. Heese indicates that until 1807, 36.8% of the forefathers of the White Afrikaans speaking population were Dutch, 35% were German, 14.6% were French and 7.2% Non-White. Also, a sizeable minority of those who spoke Afrikaans as a first language were not White. The dialect became known as "Cape Dutch". Later, Afrikaans was sometimes also referred to as "African Dutch". Afrikaans was considered a Dutch dialect until the early 20th century, when it began to be widely recognized as a distinct language. The name Afrikaans is simply the Dutch word for African.
Afrikaans is linguistically closely related to 17th century Dutch, and to modern Dutch by extension. It is similar to Flemish. Speakers of each language can make themselves easily understood by speakers of the other. Other less closely related languages include the Low Saxon spoken in northern Germany and the Netherlands, German, and English. Cape Dutch vocabulary diverged from the Dutch vocabulary spoken in the Netherlands over time as Cape Dutch absorbed words from other European settlers, East Indian slaves, and native African languages. Printed material among the Afrikaners at first used only proper European Dutch. By the mid-19th century, more and more was appearing in Afrikaans, which was very much still regarded as a spoken regional dialect. The first Afrikaans grammars and dictionaries were published in 1875 by the Genootskap vir Regte Afrikaanders (Society for Real Afrikaners) in Cape Town. Official government proclamation of Afrikaans as a distinct language from Dutch came in 1925. The official languages of the Union of South Africa were English and Dutch until that time. Dutch was replaced as an official language by Afrikaans.
Besides vocabulary, the most striking difference from Dutch is its much more regular grammar, which is likely the result of mutual interference with one or more creole languages based on the Dutch language spoken by the relatively large number of non-Dutch speakers ( Khoisan, Khoikhoi , German, French, Malay, and speakers of different African languages) during the formation period of the language in the second half of the 17th century. In 1710, slaves outnumbered free settlers.
There are a lot of different theories about how Afrikaans came to be. The Afrikaan School have long seen Afrikaans as a natural development from the South-Hollandic Dutch dialect, but have also only considered the Afrikaans as spoken by the whites. The Afrikaan School have also rejected all alternative ideas.
Most linguistics scholars today are certain that Afrikaans has been influenced by creole languages based on the South-Holland Dutch dialect. It is very hard finding out how this influence took place, since there are almost no written material written in the Dutch-based creole languages; only a few sentences found in unrelated books often written by non-speakers.
Although much of the vocabulary of Afrikaans reflects its origins in 17th century South-Hollandic Dutch, it also contains words loaned from Indonesian languages, Malay (the oldest known written Afrikaans uses Arabic letters and was intended for use among Cape Town's Muslims), Portuguese, French, Khoi and San dialects, English, isiXhosa and many other languages. Consequently, many words in Afrikaans are very different from Dutch, as demonstrated by the names of different fruits:
| AFRIKAANS | DUTCH | ENGLISH |
| piesang* | banaan | banana |
| lemoen | sinaasappel | orange |
| suurlemoen | citroen | lemon |
* from Malay pisang (a word that is known in Dutch as well through the Dutch East Indies link)
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