Afrikaans language

Afrikaans (in its own language: Afrikaans) is a West Germanic language that is descended from and still closely related to Dutch. It is spoken by many people in South Africa and Namibia. Although it has been incorrectly referred to as a "creole", it is in fact an Ausbau language, that is a local offshoot from Dutch with a separate codification. The language retains many features in common with Dutch and remains mutually intelligible with it.

Afrikaans arose in the 17th and 18th centuries in what was then a victualing station for the Dutch East India Company (now the area around Cape Town, South Africa) out of the Zeelandic and Hollandic dialects spoken by the Dutch settlers. Through contact with native African peoples as well as other ethnic groups which had settled in the Cape colony, the spoken Dutch language of the settlers changed considerably from written Dutch. This spoken language, sometimes called Cape Dutch, developed a simplified morphology (e.g. reducing verbal and nominal inflections, reducing the number of noun genders to one) and imported considerable vocabulary from African languages as well as from Portuguese and Indonesian.

Until after the Boer Wars of the late 19th centuries, many Dutch people considered the language a dialect of Dutch. Dutch churches and other groups continued to send teachers to South Africa to teach Dutch. However, in 1925, South Africa enshrined Afrikaans, as distinct from Dutch, as one of the official languages in the country's constitution.

Afrikaans is currently one of 11 official languages of South Africa. Despite considerable loss of prestige after the end of apartheid, with which it came to be closely associated, it remains to be spoken by many people in the Northern and Western Cape provinces of the country as well as by ca. 45% of people in the adjoining country of Namibia (which was occupied and administered by South Africa from 1918-1990).