Afrikaans

Where the earliest Afrikaans was written

The first known works in Afrikaans used Arabic letters. From about 1815 it began to replace Malay as the language of instruction in the Muslim schools of the Cape, written in what is called Arabic Afrikaans, at a time when Standard Dutch was the main written language. An anonymous poem of 1795 mocking the people of Swellendam is the earliest deliberate imitation of the spoken form. Afrikaans in Latin letters appeared in newspapers and in political and religious works from around 1850, and L. H. Meurant's Zamenspraak tusschen Klaas Waarzegger en Jan Twyfelaar of 1861 is considered the first book in the language.

In 1875 speakers at the Cape founded the Genootskap vir Regte Afrikaaners, the Society for Real Afrikaners, to establish Afrikaans as a written language. A grammar followed in 1876 and a bilingual dictionary in 1902. South Africa adopted Roeland Kollewijn's simplified Dutch spelling in 1905, and it became the basis of modern Afrikaans orthography.

How the law split Afrikaans from Dutch

The Official Languages of the Union Act was passed on 8 May 1925, when the government recognised Afrikaans as a language of its own and not simply a vernacular of Dutch. The Constitution of 1961 made English and Afrikaans the official languages, with Afrikaans deemed to include Dutch, and the Constitution of 1983 dropped Dutch entirely. The first official translation of the whole Bible appeared in 1933. The Afrikaans Language Monument above Paarl was opened on 10 October 1975, fifty years after the 1925 act.

Census figures show first language speakers falling from 13.5% of South Africans in 2011 to 10.6% in 2022.

What sets Afrikaans spelling apart from Dutch

Afrikaans writes s where Dutch writes z, since it merged the two sounds: Dutch zuid, south, is suid. Dutch ij becomes y, and many consonants are dropped, so slechts, only, becomes slegs. The indefinite article is 'n, sometimes set as the ligature ʼn. It has no capital form, and when it opens a sentence the next word takes the capital. A bit is ʼn bietjie, against Dutch beetje.