Afrikaans is like Dutch with the grammar stripped down. It grew out of the Dutch that settlers brought to the Cape in the 17th century, and an estimated 90 to 95 percent of its words still come from Dutch. The verbs have one form for every person, nouns have no gender, and the spelling follows the sound. Dutch speakers can read it with little trouble.
It is still its own language, with its own standard, its own literature and about 6.3 million home speakers in South Africa alone. Below you get the short history, real sentences next to their Dutch versions, the words Afrikaans picked up from Malay and Khoisan languages, and what the research says about how well Dutch and Afrikaans speakers understand each other.
What is Afrikaans like compared to Dutch?
Put a Dutch sentence next to an Afrikaans one and you see the family tie at once. Dutch says ik heb een boek (I have a book). Afrikaans says ek het ‘n boek. Most of the words are the same words in a slightly different coat. Wikipedia’s comparison of the two languages puts the share of Afrikaans vocabulary with a Dutch origin at 90 to 95 percent.
The big difference is in the grammar. Dutch verbs change with the person: ik ben, jij bent, hij is, wij zijn (I am, you are, he is, we are). Afrikaans uses one form for everyone: ek is, jy is, hy is, ons is. The same goes for every other verb. Dutch has ik ga and hij doet, Afrikaans has ek gaan and hy doen.
Nouns got simpler too. Dutch has two words for “the”, de and het, and you have to learn which noun takes which. Afrikaans has one: die. If Dutch grammar is what scares you, read is Dutch hard to learn for English speakers and then picture the same language with those problems removed.
Where does Afrikaans come from?
In 1652 the Dutch East India Company set up a supply station at the Cape of Good Hope under Jan van Riebeeck. The settlers spoke 17th-century Dutch dialects, mainly from Holland and Zeeland. Over the next two centuries their Dutch changed, far from the Netherlands and in daily contact with other peoples.
Those other peoples shaped the language. The Cape had enslaved workers from the Dutch East Indies, India and Madagascar, and Khoisan people who worked as interpreters, servants and labourers. They learned Dutch as a second language and passed their version on. The linguists Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman argue that Afrikaans was “heavily conditioned by nonwhites who learned Dutch imperfectly as a second language.”
For a long time nobody treated the result as a real language. People called it Cape Dutch, or kombuistaal, kitchen language. One of its first written forms came from the Cape Muslim community, who wrote it in Arabic script for religious teaching from about 1815. The first book in Afrikaans, by L. H. Meurant, appeared in 1861.
Book tip
Colloquial Afrikaans: The Complete Course for Beginners by Bruce Donaldson
Bruce Donaldson also wrote reference grammars of Dutch and Afrikaans, so this course explains each Afrikaans rule with a clear eye for where it left Dutch behind. It takes you from the first greetings to real conversations, with dialogues, exercises and a grammar summary.
When did Afrikaans become its own language?
The push started in 1875, when a group in Paarl founded the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners (Society of Real Afrikaners) to turn the spoken language into a written one. A first grammar followed in 1876 and a bilingual dictionary in 1902.
Official status came on 8 May 1925, when the Union of South Africa recognised Afrikaans as a language in its own right and not a spoken form of Dutch. The first full Bible translation arrived in 1933. Before that, Afrikaans speakers read the Dutch Statenbijbel, whose 17th-century language was getting harder and harder for them to follow.
Dutch faded from South African law after that. The 1961 constitution named English and Afrikaans as the official languages, and the 1983 constitution dropped any mention of Dutch. So the answer to “is Afrikaans Dutch?” is no. It is a daughter of Dutch, in the same way Italian is a daughter of Latin, just much younger. You can see where both sit in our Germanic language family tree.
What does Afrikaans grammar look like?
The feature every learner notices first is the double negative. Afrikaans puts nie after the verb and again at the end of the sentence: Hy kan nie Afrikaans praat nie, word for word “he can not Afrikaans speak not”. “I don’t speak English” is Ek praat nie Engels nie. Standard Dutch does not do this. French does something similar with ne and pas.
The past tense is just as regular. You take het (have) and put ge- in front of the verb: ek het gedoen means I did or I have done. Dutch has a long list of irregular forms such as gedaan (done). Afrikaans kept that old form in one fixed phrase, welgedaan! (well done!).
Pronouns shifted as well. “We” is ons, which in Dutch only means us or our. “They” is hulle. So “they are the best” is hulle is die beste in Afrikaans and ze zijn de beste in Dutch. A Dutch speaker understands the Afrikaans sentence at once, even though no Dutch grammar book would allow it.
How is Afrikaans spelling different from Dutch?
Afrikaans spells words the way it says them, and that makes the page look different from Dutch even when the word is the same. The Dutch ij became y: prijs (price) is prys. The Dutch z became s, because Afrikaans does not tell the two sounds apart: zuid (south) is suid.
Consonant clusters got shorter. Dutch slecht (bad) is sleg, and slechts (only) is slegs. The Dutch sch at the start of a word turned into sk, so school is skool. Loanwords follow the sound too, which gives you kommunikasie for Dutch communicatie.
Dutch itself is not one thing either. If you want to know how much the language varies inside Europe, see Flemish vs Dutch. Those two still share one spelling and one grammar. Afrikaans went much further than Flemish ever did.
Which Afrikaans words do not come from Dutch?
The 5 to 10 percent that is not Dutch is what trips Dutch speakers up, because some of those words are very common. The best known is baie, which means very, much or many. It comes from Malay banyak, and you hear it in almost every conversation: baie dankie is thank you very much. Dutch would say veel or erg.
Malay also gave Afrikaans baadjie (jacket, from baju) and piesang (banana), where Dutch says jas and banaan. Other words came from Khoisan languages, Portuguese and the Bantu languages of southern Africa.
Afrikaans also builds its own words where Dutch borrows from English. A milkshake is a melkskommel, from melk and skommel (to shake), while the Dutch just say milkshake. And the traffic runs the other way too. English took trek, aardvark (earth pig) and apartheid (separateness) straight from Afrikaans.
Can Dutch and Afrikaans speakers understand each other?
Mostly yes, and better on paper than out loud. In 2006 the linguists Charlotte Gooskens and Renée van Bezooijen tested how well Dutch and Afrikaans speakers understood each other’s written language. The result was lopsided: Dutch readers understood Afrikaans better than Afrikaans readers understood Dutch.
The reason is in the vocabulary. Afrikaans simplified Dutch, so almost everything in an Afrikaans text has a Dutch cousin the reader knows. A Dutch text contains verb forms, articles and words that Afrikaans dropped long ago, so the Afrikaans reader has more gaps to fill. The researchers concluded that the number of unrelated words mattered more than what people thought of the other language.
Research also suggests that Dutch and Afrikaans speakers understand each other better than Dutch and Frisian speakers do, and better than Danes and Swedes. For comparison, Dutch and German are much further apart, as you can read in Dutch vs German: how similar are they.
Who speaks Afrikaans today?
In the 2022 South African census, 10.6 percent of the population spoke Afrikaans at home, about 6.3 million people. That makes it the third most spoken home language in the country. The share is falling (it was 13.5 percent in 2011), but the number of speakers has still grown since the 1990s. In Namibia, 10.4 percent of people spoke it at home in the 2011 census, and many more use it as a second language.
Most of those speakers are not white Afrikaners. The majority of Afrikaans speakers today are Coloured South Africans, many of them descendants of the people who shaped the language at the Cape in the first place. Varieties such as Kaaps in the Western Cape and Orange River Afrikaans keep that history alive.
The language also carries a heavy past. In 1976 the apartheid government ordered that Afrikaans be used to teach half the subjects in Black secondary schools. Pupils in Soweto rose up against the rule, and the protests became a turning point in South African history. Today Afrikaans is one of 12 official languages, no longer one of two.
Is Afrikaans a dialect of Dutch?
No. Afrikaans descends from 17th-century Dutch dialects, but South Africa recognised it as a separate language in 1925. It has its own standard grammar, spelling and literature. Linguists call it a daughter language of Dutch.
Can Dutch people understand Afrikaans?
Yes, to a large degree, especially in writing. A 2006 study by Gooskens and van Bezooijen found that Dutch speakers understand written Afrikaans better than Afrikaans speakers understand written Dutch, because Afrikaans dropped many forms that Dutch kept.
Is Afrikaans easy to learn for English speakers?
Afrikaans has one verb form for every person, no grammatical gender and regular spelling. The US Foreign Service Institute places it in Category I, its easiest group for English speakers, at about 24 weeks of full-time study.
What does this have to do with Frisian?
Afrikaans and Frisian share one thing you can see on the page. Where Dutch writes sch, both write sk. School is school in Dutch, skool in Afrikaans and skoalle in Frisian. Ship is schip in Dutch and skip in both Afrikaans and Frisian. Sheep is schaap in Dutch, skaap in Afrikaans and skiep in Frisian.
The two languages have very different histories, though. Afrikaans is a daughter of Dutch that is about three centuries old. Frisian was never Dutch at all. It is a separate West Germanic language with its own medieval written tradition, which fits the research finding that Dutch speakers follow Afrikaans more easily than Frisian, even though Friesland lies inside the Netherlands and Cape Town is a long flight away. You can look up any Frisian word in our Frisian dictionary, or start from zero with the free Frisian course.
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