North Germanic languages
83-655: The Berg River (also called Great Berg River or in Afrikaans : Bergrivier ) is a river located just north of Cape Town in the Western Cape Province of South Africa . It is approximately 294 km (183 mi) long with a catchment area of 7,715 km (2,979 sq mi) and empties into the Atlantic Ocean . About 65% of the Berg River area is under agriculture. The major towns in
166-461: A decreasing number of first language Afrikaans speakers in South Africa from 13.5% in 2011 to 10.6% in 2022. The South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) projects that a growing majority of Afrikaans speakers will be Coloured . Afrikaans speakers experience higher employment rates than other South African language groups, though as of 2012 half a million were unemployed. Despite
249-597: A dozen remained, sheltering in the region of Kersefontein and the estuary. In 1829, only six hippos remained. The last known hippo was shot in 1869 by Martin Melck when it attacked and killed one of his employees." See Skead for more details. The Berg River's native fishes contain some species which are endemic to the region such as the Cape galaxias (Galaxias zebratus) and Berg River redfin ( Pseudobarbus burgi ). They have been adversely affected by unsustainable human use of
332-477: A list of various linguistic features and their extent among the West Germanic languages, organized roughly from northwest to southeast. Some may only appear in the older languages but are no longer apparent in the modern languages. The following table shows some comparisons of consonant development in the respective dialect/language (online examples though) continuum, showing the gradually growing partake in
415-496: A massive evidence for a valid West Germanic clade". After East Germanic broke off (an event usually dated to the 2nd or 1st century BC), the remaining Germanic languages, the Northwest Germanic languages, divided into four main dialects: North Germanic, and the three groups conventionally called "West Germanic", namely: Although there is quite a bit of knowledge about North Sea Germanic or Anglo-Frisian (because of
498-575: A national, but not official, language. There is a much smaller number of Afrikaans speakers among Zimbabwe's white minority, as most have left the country since 1980. Afrikaans was also a medium of instruction for schools in Bophuthatswana , an Apartheid-era Bantustan . Eldoret in Kenya was founded by Afrikaners. There are also around 30.000 South-Africans in the Netherlands , of which
581-415: A number of Frisian, English, Scots, Yola, Dutch, Limburgish, German and Afrikaans words with common West Germanic (or older) origin. The grammatical gender of each term is noted as masculine ( m. ), feminine ( f. ), or neuter ( n. ) where relevant. Other words, with a variety of origins: Note that some of the shown similarities of Frisian and English vis-à-vis Dutch and German are secondary and not due to
664-622: A second language. It is widely taught in South African schools, with about 10.3 million second-language students. Afrikaans is offered at many universities outside South Africa, including in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Russia and the United States. In Afrikaans grammar, there is no distinction between the infinitive and present forms of verbs, with the exception of the verbs 'to be' and 'to have'. In addition, verbs do not conjugate differently depending on
747-410: A series of pioneering reconstructions of Proto-West Germanic morphological paradigmas and new views on some early West Germanic phonological changes, and in 2013 the first monographic analysis and description of Proto-West Germanic was published (second edition 2022). Today, there is a scientific consensus on what Don Ringe stated in 2012, that "these [phonological and morphological] changes amount to
830-599: A single negation. Certain words in Afrikaans would be contracted. For example, moet nie , which literally means 'must not', usually becomes moenie ; although one does not have to write or say it like this, virtually all Afrikaans speakers will change the two words to moenie in the same way as do not is contracted to don't in English. West Germanic languages West Germanic languages West Germanic languages The West Germanic languages constitute
913-515: Is "a pure and proper language" for religious purposes, especially among the deeply Calvinist Afrikaans religious community that previously had been sceptical of a Bible translation that varied from the Dutch version that they were used to. In 1983 a fresh translation marked the 50th anniversary of the 1933 version. The final editing of this edition was done by E. P. Groenewald, A. H. van Zyl, P. A. Verhoef, J. L. Helberg and W. Kempen. This translation
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#1732794317092996-671: Is a West Germanic language , spoken in South Africa , Namibia and (to a lesser extent) Botswana , Zambia and Zimbabwe . It evolved from the Dutch vernacular of South Holland ( Hollandic dialect ) spoken by the predominantly Dutch settlers and enslaved population of the Dutch Cape Colony , where it gradually began to develop distinguishing characteristics in the 17th and 18th centuries. Although Afrikaans has adopted words from other languages, including German and
1079-553: Is a groundswell movement within Afrikaans to be inclusive, and to promote itself along with the indigenous official languages. In Namibia, the percentage of Afrikaans speakers declined from 11.4% (2001 Census) to 10.4% (2011 Census). The major concentrations are in Hardap (41.0%), ǁKaras (36.1%), Erongo (20.5%), Khomas (18.5%), Omaheke (10.0%), Otjozondjupa (9.4%), Kunene (4.2%), and Oshikoto (2.3%). Some native speakers of Bantu languages and English also speak Afrikaans as
1162-526: Is absent from the other West Germanic standard languages. For example: Both French and San origins have been suggested for double negation in Afrikaans. While double negation is still found in Low Franconian dialects in West Flanders and in some "isolated" villages in the centre of the Netherlands (such as Garderen ), it takes a different form, which is not found in Afrikaans. The following
1245-475: Is an example: Compare with Ek wil dit nie doen nie , which changes the meaning to 'I want not to do this'. Whereas Ek wil nie dit doen nie emphasizes a lack of desire to act, Ek wil dit nie doen nie emphasizes the act itself. The -ne was the Middle Dutch way to negate but it has been suggested that since -ne became highly non-voiced, nie or niet was needed to complement
1328-691: Is by far the most-spoken West Germanic language, with more than 1 billion speakers worldwide. Within Europe, the three most prevalent West Germanic languages are English, German, and Dutch. Frisian, spoken by about 450,000 people, constitutes a fourth distinct variety of West Germanic. The language family also includes Afrikaans , Yiddish , Low Saxon , Luxembourgish , Hunsrik , and Scots . Additionally, several creoles , patois , and pidgins are based on Dutch, English, or German. The Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups: West, East and North Germanic. In some cases, their exact relation
1411-754: Is in the extreme northern part of Germany between the Danish border and the Baltic coast. The area of the Saxons (parts of today's Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony ) lay south of Anglia. The Angles and Saxons , two Germanic tribes , in combination with a number of other peoples from northern Germany and the Jutland Peninsula, particularly the Jutes , settled in Britain following the end of Roman rule in
1494-569: Is neither a creole nor a direct descendant of Dutch, but a fusion of two transmission pathways. Most of the first settlers whose descendants today are the Afrikaners were from the United Provinces (now Netherlands), with up to one-sixth of the community of French Huguenot origin, and a seventh from Germany. African and Asian workers, Cape Coloured children of European settlers and Khoikhoi women, and slaves contributed to
1577-539: Is now southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland can be considered the end of the linguistic unity among the West Germanic dialects, although its effects on their own should not be overestimated. Bordering dialects very probably continued to be mutually intelligible even beyond the boundaries of the consonant shift. During the Early Middle Ages , the West Germanic languages were separated by the insular development of Old and Middle English on one hand, and by
1660-537: Is seen as the dawn of a new era in Afrikaans cinema. Several short films have been created and more feature-length movies, such as Poena Is Koning and Bakgat (both in 2008) have been produced, besides the 2011 Afrikaans-language film Skoonheid , which was the first Afrikaans film to screen at the Cannes Film Festival . The film Platteland was also released in 2011. The Afrikaans film industry started gaining international recognition via
1743-405: The -ne . With time the -ne disappeared in most Dutch dialects. The double negative construction has been fully grammaticalised in standard Afrikaans and its proper use follows a set of fairly complex rules as the examples below show: A notable exception to this is the use of the negating grammar form that coincides with negating the English present participle . In this case there is only
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#17327943170921826-605: The Evangelie volgens Markus ( Gospel of Mark , lit. 'Gospel according to Mark'); however, this translation was never published. The manuscript is to be found in the South African National Library, Cape Town. The first official translation of the entire Bible into Afrikaans was in 1933 by J. D. du Toit , E. E. van Rooyen, J. D. Kestell, H. C. M. Fourie, and BB Keet . This monumental work established Afrikaans as 'n suiwer en ordentlike taal , that
1909-696: The Arabic alphabet : see Arabic Afrikaans . Later, Afrikaans, now written with the Latin script , started to appear in newspapers and political and religious works in around 1850 (alongside the already established Dutch). In 1875 a group of Afrikaans-speakers from the Cape formed the Genootskap vir Regte Afrikaaners ('Society for Real Afrikaners'), and published a number of books in Afrikaans including grammars, dictionaries, religious materials and histories. Until
1992-515: The High German consonant shift and the anglofrisian palatalization. The table uses IPA , to avoid confusion via orthographical differences. The realisation of [r] will be ignored. C = any consonant, A = back vowel, E = front vowel The existence of a unified Proto-West Germanic language is debated. Features which are common to West Germanic languages may be attributed either to common inheritance or to areal effects. The phonological system of
2075-511: The High German consonant shift on the continent on the other. The High German consonant shift distinguished the High German languages from the other West Germanic languages. By early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South (the Walliser dialect being the southernmost surviving German dialect) to Northern Low Saxon in
2158-535: The Khoisan languages , an estimated 90 to 95% of the vocabulary of Afrikaans is of Dutch origin. Differences between Afrikaans and Dutch often lie in the more analytic morphology and grammar of Afrikaans, and different spellings. There is a large degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages, especially in written form . The name of the language comes directly from the Dutch word Afrikaansch (now spelled Afrikaans ) meaning 'African'. It
2241-570: The Migration Period , while others hold that speakers of West Germanic dialects like Old Frankish and speakers of Gothic were already unable to communicate fluently by around the 3rd century AD. As a result of the substantial progress in the study of Proto-West Germanic in the early 21st century, there is a growing consensus that East and West Germanic indeed would have been mutually unintelligible at that time, whereas West and North Germanic remained partially intelligible. Dialects with
2324-733: The Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, were involved. 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 , Yiddish , and the unstandardised language Low German . Afrikaans is also widely spoken in Namibia. Before independence, Afrikaans had equal status with German as an official language. Since independence in 1990, Afrikaans has had constitutional recognition as
2407-517: The Senate , in which the Afrikaans language was declared a variety of Dutch. The Constitution of 1961 reversed the position of Afrikaans and Dutch, so that English and Afrikaans were the official languages, and Afrikaans was deemed to include Dutch. The Constitution of 1983 removed any mention of Dutch altogether. The Afrikaans Language Monument is on a hill overlooking Paarl in the Western Cape Province . Officially opened on 10 October 1975, it
2490-538: The Synod of Dordrecht of 1618 and was thus in an archaic form of Dutch. This was hard for Dutch speakers to understand, and increasingly unintelligible for Afrikaans speakers. C. P. Hoogehout, Arnoldus Pannevis [ af ] , and Stephanus Jacobus du Toit were the first Afrikaans Bible translators. Important landmarks in the translation of the Scriptures were in 1878 with C. P. Hoogehout's translation of
2573-564: The constitution of the Western Cape , which went into effect in 1998, declares Afrikaans to be an official language of the province alongside English and Xhosa . The Afrikaans-language general-interest family magazine Huisgenoot has the largest readership of any magazine in the country. When the British design magazine Wallpaper described Afrikaans as "one of the world's ugliest languages" in its September 2005 article about
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2656-526: The monument , South African billionaire Johann Rupert (chairman of the Richemont Group ), responded by withdrawing advertising for brands such as Cartier , Van Cleef & Arpels , Montblanc and Alfred Dunhill from the magazine. The author of the article, Bronwyn Davies, was an English -speaking South African. An estimated 90 to 95 percent of the Afrikaans lexicon is ultimately of Dutch origin, and there are few lexical differences between
2739-452: The "language of the white oppressor" by some, pressure has been increased to remove Afrikaans as a teaching language in South African universities, resulting in bloody student protests in 2015. Under South Africa's Constitution of 1996, Afrikaans remains an official language , and has equal status to English and nine other languages. The new policy means that the use of Afrikaans is now often reduced in favour of English, or to accommodate
2822-676: The Arabic script. In 1861, L.H. Meurant published his Zamenspraak tusschen Klaas Waarzegger en Jan Twyfelaar ( Conversation between Nicholas Truthsayer and John Doubter ), which is considered to be the first book published in Afrikaans. The first grammar book was published in 1876; a bilingual dictionary was later published in 1902. The main modern Afrikaans dictionary in use is the Verklarende Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (HAT). A new authoritative dictionary, called Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (WAT),
2905-463: The Berg River area are Velddrif and Laaiplek near the coast, and Piketberg , Hopefield , Moorreesburg and Darling further inland. The Berg River can be subdivided into the following segments: The first known European record of the Berg River was made by bailiff Abraham Gabbema in 1657 when Dutch Governor Jan van Riebeeck sent him to trade with the Khoikhoi for meat for the settlement at
2988-708: The Berg River; its decline there seems to have stopped or at least slowed, but it too is already listed as Endangered by the IUCN. Trout are also a problem in the upper Berg river. In 2022, the 1162.8 ha Berg Estuary Ramsar Site was designated around the Berg River. Around 127 species of waterbird have been recorded in the surrounding wetland habitat, including the threatened Cape cormorant . Threatened fish found within its waters include white steenbras and white stumpnose . Afrikaans Afrikaans ( / ˌ æ f r ɪ ˈ k ɑː n s / AF -rih- KAHNSS , / ˌ ɑː f -, - ˈ k ɑː n z / AHF -, - KAHNZ )
3071-766: The Boers and their servants." In 1925 Afrikaans was recognised by the South African government as a distinct language, rather than simply a vernacular of Dutch. On 8 May 1925, that is 23 years after the Second Boer War ended, the Official Languages of the Union Act, 1925 was passed—mostly due to the efforts of the Afrikaans-language movement —at a joint sitting of the House of Assembly and
3154-531: The Cape. Gabbema named the river the ‘Groot Berg Rivier’. In years to follow many of van Riebeeck's men relied on the river waters and followed its winding course as they ventured northwards. Despite Gabbema's visit, the Berg Catchment was not developed until Governor Simon van der Stel ’s time (1679–1699), prior to which settlement was limited to the Peninsula. Governor van der Stel visited the area with
3237-519: The Dutch Cape Colony between 1652 and 1672 had a Dutch father. Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman argue that Afrikaans' development as a separate language was "heavily conditioned by nonwhites who learned Dutch imperfectly as a second language." Beginning in about 1815, Afrikaans started to replace Malay as the language of instruction in Muslim schools in South Africa, written with
3320-453: The North. Although both extremes are considered German , they are not mutually intelligible. The southernmost varieties have completed the second sound shift, whereas the northern dialects remained unaffected by the consonant shift. Of modern German varieties, Low German is the one that most resembles modern English. The district of Angeln (or Anglia), from which the name English derives,
3403-668: The Proto-West Germanic language was published in 2013 by Wolfram Euler , followed in 2014 by the study of Donald Ringe and Ann Taylor. If indeed Proto-West Germanic existed, it must have been between the 2nd and 7th centuries. Until the late 2nd century AD, the language of runic inscriptions found in Scandinavia and in Northern Germany were so similar that Proto-North Germanic and the Western dialects in
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3486-522: The West Germanic branching as reconstructed is mostly similar to that of Proto-Germanic, with some changes in the categorization and phonetic realization of some phonemes. In addition to the particular changes described above, some notable differences in the consonant system of West Germanic from Proto-Germanic are: Some notable differences in the vowel system of West Germanic from Proto-Germanic are: The noun paradigms of Proto-West Germanic have been reconstructed as follows: The following table compares
3569-420: The West Germanic language and finally the formation of the daughter languages. It has been argued that, judging by their nearly identical syntax, the West Germanic dialects were closely enough related to have been mutually intelligible up to the 7th century. Over the course of this period, the dialects diverged successively. The High German consonant shift that occurred mostly during the 7th century AD in what
3652-431: The West Germanic languages and are thus seen as a Proto West Germanic innovation. Since at least the early 20th century, a number of morphological, phonological, and lexical archaisms and innovations have been identified as specifically West Germanic. Since then, individual Proto-West Germanic lexemes have also been reconstructed. Yet, there was a long dispute if these West Germanic characteristics had to be explained with
3735-677: The West Germanic languages is the development of a gerund . Common morphological archaisms of West Germanic include: Furthermore, the West Germanic languages share many lexemes not existing in North Germanic and/or East Germanic – archaisms as well as common neologisms. Some lexemes have specific meanings in West Germanic and there are specific innovations in word formation and derivational morphology, for example neologisms ending with modern English -ship (< wgerm. -*skapi , cf. German -schaft ) like friendship (< wg. *friund(a)skapi , cf. German Freundschaft ) are specific to
3818-451: The challenges of demotion and emigration that it faces in South Africa, the Afrikaans vernacular remains competitive, being popular in DSTV pay channels and several internet sites, while generating high newspaper and music CD sales. A resurgence in Afrikaans popular music since the late 1990s has invigorated the language, especially among a younger generation of South Africans. A recent trend is
3901-410: The characteristic features of its daughter languages, Anglo-Saxon/ Old English and Old Frisian ), linguists know almost nothing about "Weser–Rhine Germanic" and "Elbe Germanic". In fact, both terms were coined in the 1940s to refer to groups of archaeological findings, rather than linguistic features. Only later were the terms applied to hypothetical dialectal differences within both regions. Even today,
3984-408: The concept of a West Germanic proto-language claim that, not only shared innovations can require the existence of a linguistic clade , but also that there are archaisms that cannot be explained simply as retentions later lost in the North or East, because this assumption can produce contradictions with attested features of the other branches. The debate on the existence of a Proto-West Germanic clade
4067-815: The course of the 18th century. As early as the mid-18th century and as recently as the mid-20th century, Afrikaans was known in standard Dutch as a 'kitchen language' (Dutch: kombuistaal ), lacking the prestige accorded, for example, even by the educational system in Africa, to languages spoken outside Africa. Other early epithets setting apart Kaaps Hollands (' Cape Dutch ', i.e. Afrikaans) as putatively beneath official Dutch standards included geradbraakt , gebroken and onbeschaafd Hollands ('mutilated, broken, or uncivilised Dutch'), as well as verkeerd Nederlands ('incorrect Dutch'). Historical linguist Hans den Besten theorises that modern Standard Afrikaans derives from two sources: So Afrikaans, in his view,
4150-512: The development of Afrikaans. The slave population was made up of people from East Africa, West Africa, Mughal India , Madagascar , and the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia). A number were also indigenous Khoisan people, who were valued as interpreters, domestic servants, and labourers. Many free and enslaved women married or cohabited with the male Dutch settlers. M. F. Valkhoff argued that 75% of children born to female slaves in
4233-459: The early 20th century Afrikaans was considered a Dutch dialect , alongside Standard Dutch , which it eventually replaced as an official language. Before the Boer wars , "and indeed for some time afterwards, Afrikaans was regarded as inappropriate for educated discourse. Rather, Afrikaans was described derogatorily as 'a kitchen language' or 'a bastard jargon', suitable for communication mainly between
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#17327943170924316-533: The existence of a West Germanic proto-language or rather with Sprachbund effects. Hans Frede Nielsen 's 1981 study Old English and the Continental Germanic Languages made the conviction grow that a West Germanic proto-language did exist. But up until the 1990s, some scholars doubted that there was once a Proto-West Germanic proto-language which was ancestral only to later West Germanic languages. In 2002, Gert Klingenschmitt presented
4399-492: The features assigned to the western group formed from Proto-Germanic in the late Jastorf culture ( c. 1st century BC ). The West Germanic group is characterized by a number of phonological , morphological and lexical innovations or archaisms not found in North and East Germanic. Examples of West Germanic phonological particularities are: A relative chronology of about 20 sound changes from Proto-Northwest Germanic to Proto-West Germanic (some of them only regional)
4482-536: The first free burghers, and prompted by the Berg River’s fertility and beauty, he established the first European settlements at Paarl and in the Drakenstein valley in 1687. Wellington , Franschhoek and Tulbagh were established shortly after this as the farmlands expanded. The 2004 government report on the river said: “Historically, the Berg River was one of many habitats in the Cape inhabited by hippos but, in
4565-473: The government for Afrikaans, in terms of education, social events, media (TV and radio), and general status throughout the country, given that it now shares its place as official language with ten other languages. Nevertheless, Afrikaans remains more prevalent in the media – radio, newspapers and television – than any of the other official languages, except English. More than 300 book titles in Afrikaans are published annually. South African census figures suggest
4648-406: The increased availability of pre-school educational CDs and DVDs. Such media also prove popular with the extensive Afrikaans-speaking emigrant communities who seek to retain language proficiency in a household context. Afrikaans-language cinema showed signs of new vigour in the early 21st century. The 2007 film Ouma se slim kind , the first full-length Afrikaans movie since Paljas in 1998,
4731-480: The island. Once in Britain, these Germanic peoples eventually developed a shared cultural and linguistic identity as Anglo-Saxons ; the extent of the linguistic influence of the native Romano-British population on the incomers is debatable. Divisions between subfamilies of continental Germanic languages are rarely precisely defined; most form dialect continua , with adjacent dialects being mutually intelligible and more separated ones not. The following table shows
4814-544: The language distance for Anglophones once remarked that the differences between (Standard) Dutch and Afrikaans are comparable to those between the Received Pronunciation and Southern American English . Afrikaans is an official language of the Republic of South Africa and a recognised national language of the Republic of Namibia. Post-apartheid South Africa has seen a loss of preferential treatment by
4897-581: The language of instruction for half the subjects taught in non-White schools (with English continuing for the other half). 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. The Black community's opposition to Afrikaans and preference for continuing English instruction
4980-655: The largest of the three branches of the Germanic family of languages (the others being the North Germanic and the extinct East Germanic languages). The West Germanic branch is classically subdivided into three branches: Ingvaeonic , which includes English , the Low German languages , and the Frisian languages ; Istvaeonic , which encompasses Dutch and its close relatives; and Irminonic , which includes German and its close relatives and variants. English
5063-418: The late 1600s, hunters began overexploiting the hippos for their meat and hides, resulting in a decline in their numbers. By the mid-1700s, they had declined to such an extent that governor Tulbagh introduced a fine of 1000 guilders for anyone caught killing a hippo. Despite this protection, their numbers continued to dwindle as human settlement altered and destroyed their habitat. By the early 1800s, perhaps only
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#17327943170925146-513: The likes of big Afrikaans Hollywood film stars, like Charlize Theron ( Monster ) and Sharlto Copley ( District 9 ) promoting their mother tongue. SABC 3 announced early in 2009 that it would increase Afrikaans programming due to the "growing Afrikaans-language market and [their] need for working capital as Afrikaans advertising is the only advertising that sells in the current South African television market". In April 2009, SABC3 started screening several Afrikaans-language programmes. There
5229-541: The majority are of Afrikaans-speaking Afrikaner and Coloured South-African descent. A much smaller and unknown number of speakers also reside in the Dutch Caribbean . Contrary to popular belief, the majority of Afrikaans speakers today are not Afrikaners or Boers , but Coloureds . In 1976, secondary-school pupils in Soweto began a rebellion in response to the government's decision that Afrikaans be used as
5312-525: The other hand, the internal subgrouping of both North Germanic and West Germanic is very messy, and it seems clear that each of those subfamilies diversified into a network of dialects that remained in contact for a considerable period of time (in some cases right up to the present). Several scholars have published reconstructions of Proto-West Germanic morphological paradigms and many authors have reconstructed individual Proto-West Germanic morphological forms or lexemes. The first comprehensive reconstruction of
5395-529: The other official languages. In 1996, for example, the South African Broadcasting Corporation reduced the amount of television airtime in Afrikaans, while South African Airways dropped its Afrikaans name Suid-Afrikaanse Lugdiens from its livery . Similarly, South Africa's diplomatic missions overseas now display the name of the country only in English and their host country's language, and not in Afrikaans. Meanwhile,
5478-410: The other way round. Mutual intelligibility thus tends to be asymmetrical, as it is easier for Dutch speakers to understand Afrikaans than for Afrikaans speakers to understand Dutch. In general, mutual intelligibility between Dutch and Afrikaans is far better than between Dutch and Frisian or between Danish and Swedish . The South African poet writer Breyten Breytenbach , attempting to visualise
5561-411: The past tense is also often replaced with the perfect.) When telling a longer story, Afrikaans speakers usually avoid the perfect and simply use the present tense, or historical present tense instead (as is possible, but less common, in English as well). A particular feature of Afrikaans is its use of the double negative ; it is classified in Afrikaans as ontkennende vorm and is something that
5644-593: The properties that the West Germanic languages have in common, separate from the North Germanic languages, are not necessarily inherited from a "Proto-West Germanic" language, but may have spread by language contact among the Germanic languages spoken in Central Europe, not reaching those spoken in Scandinavia or reaching them much later. Rhotacism, for example, was largely complete in West Germanic while North Germanic runic inscriptions still clearly distinguished
5727-401: The south were still part of one language ("Proto-Northwest Germanic"). Sometime after that, the split into West and North Germanic occurred. By the 4th and 5th centuries the great migration set in. By the end of the 6th century, the area in which West Germanic languages were spoken, at least by the upper classes, had tripled compared to the year 400. This caused an increasing disintegration of
5810-442: The subject. For example, Only a handful of Afrikaans verbs have a preterite , namely the auxiliary wees ('to be'), the modal verbs , and the verb dink ('to think'). The preterite of mag ('may') is rare in contemporary Afrikaans. All other verbs use the perfect tense, het + past participle (ge-), for the past. Therefore, there is no distinction in Afrikaans between I drank and I have drunk . (In colloquial German,
5893-537: The two languages. Afrikaans has a considerably more regular morphology, grammar, and spelling. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages, particularly in written form. Afrikaans acquired some lexical and syntactical borrowings from other languages such as Malay , Khoisan languages , Portuguese, and Bantu languages , and Afrikaans has also been significantly influenced by South African English . Dutch speakers are confronted with fewer non-cognates when listening to Afrikaans than
5976-447: The two phonemes. There is also evidence that the lowering of ē to ā occurred first in West Germanic and spread to North Germanic later since word-final ē was lowered before it was shortened in West Germanic, but in North Germanic the shortening occurred first, resulting in e that later merged with i . However, there are also a number of common archaisms in West Germanic shared by neither Old Norse nor Gothic. Some authors who support
6059-451: The very small number of Migration Period runic inscriptions from the area, many of them illegible, unclear or consisting only of one word, often a name, is insufficient to identify linguistic features specific to the two supposed dialect groups. Evidence that East Germanic split off before the split between North and West Germanic comes from a number of linguistic innovations common to North and West Germanic, including: Under that view,
6142-639: The water, but mainly by expanding stocks of exotic fishes, which were originally introduced to establish a European-type fishery. Most problematic among these is the predatory Smallmouth Bass ( Micropterus dolomieu ). The Cape whitefish ( Pseudobarbus capensis ) – listed Endangered in the IUCN Red List – seems to have disappeared from the Berg River proper in recent times; this large species it survives elsewhere and may be suitable for fishery or aquaculture. The Berg River redfin ( Pseudobarbus burgi ) has one of its last major populations in
6225-432: Was difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, so that some individual varieties have been difficult to classify. This is especially true for the unattested Jutish language ; today, most scholars classify Jutish as a West Germanic variety with several features of North Germanic. Until the late 20th century, some scholars claimed that all Germanic languages remained mutually intelligible throughout
6308-589: Was erected on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Society of Real Afrikaners , and the 50th anniversary of Afrikaans being declared an official language of South Africa in distinction to Dutch. The earliest Afrikaans texts were some doggerel verse from 1795 and a dialogue transcribed by a Dutch traveller in 1825. Afrikaans used the Latin alphabet around this time, although the Cape Muslim community used
6391-572: Was influenced by Eugene Nida 's theory of dynamic equivalence which focused on finding the nearest equivalent in the receptor language to the idea that the Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic wanted to convey. A new translation, Die Bybel: 'n Direkte Vertaling was released in November 2020. It is the first truly ecumenical translation of the Bible in Afrikaans as translators from various churches, including
6474-399: Was previously referred to as 'Cape Dutch' ( Kaap-Hollands or Kaap-Nederlands ), a term also used to refer to the early Cape settlers collectively, or the derogatory 'kitchen Dutch' ( kombuistaal ) from its use by slaves of colonial settlers "in the kitchen". The Afrikaans language arose in the Dutch Cape Colony , through a gradual divergence from European Dutch dialects , during
6557-590: Was published by Don Ringe in 2014. A phonological archaism of West Germanic is the preservation of grammatischer Wechsel in most verbs, particularly in Old High German. This implies the same for West Germanic, whereas in East and North Germanic many of these alternations (in Gothic almost all of them) had been levelled out analogically by the time of the earliest texts. A common morphological innovation of
6640-422: Was summarized (2006): That North Germanic is ... a unitary subgroup [of Proto-Germanic] is completely obvious, as all of its dialects shared a long series of innovations, some of them very striking. That the same is true of West Germanic has been denied, but I will argue in vol. ii that all the West Germanic languages share several highly unusual innovations that virtually force us to posit a West Germanic clade. On
6723-679: Was the translation of the whole Bible into Afrikaans. While significant advances had been made in the textual criticism of the Bible, especially the Greek New Testament , the 1933 translation followed the Textus Receptus and was closely akin to the Statenbijbel . Before this, most Cape Dutch-Afrikaans speakers had to rely on the Dutch Statenbijbel . This Statenvertaling had its origins with
6806-549: Was under development As of 2018. The official orthography of Afrikaans is the Afrikaanse Woordelys en Spelreëls , compiled by Die Taalkommissie . The Afrikaners primarily were Protestants, of the Dutch Reformed Church of the 17th century. Their religious practices were later influenced in South Africa by British ministries during the 1800s. A landmark in the development of the language
6889-622: Was underlined when the government rescinded the policy one month after the uprising: 96% of Black schools chose English (over Afrikaans or native languages) as the language of instruction. Afrikaans-medium schools were also accused of using language policy to deter Black African parents. Some of these parents, in part supported by provincial departments of education, initiated litigation which enabled enrolment with English as language of instruction. By 2006 there were 300 single-medium Afrikaans schools, compared to 2,500 in 1994, after most converted to dual-medium education. Due to Afrikaans being viewed as
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