Some interesting facts about afrikaans

you probably didn’t know about…

Thank you to https://www.news24.com/You/Sponsored-Content/5-surprising-facts-about-afrikaans-20171101 for this awesome read!

“The first schools to use Afrikaans were Muslim and it was written in Arabic lettering

In 1815, roughly 100 years before Afrikaans was declared an official language, it started replacing Malay in Muslim schools in Cape Town and was written in Arabic script. Many of the texts written in Arabic Afrikaans were translations of the Qur’an or other religious texts. Afrikaans as it is written today, with Roman script, only started appearing in newspapers around 1850.”

“Before Afrikaans became official, it was considered a form of slang or “improper”.

Even though Afrikaans was distinctly different from Dutch because it uses words from Malay, African and French origin, it wasn’t recognised as an official language until 1925. Before this, it was often called “Kitchen Dutch” and it was considered a weak or mixed form of Dutch spoken only by uneducated people.“

“Afrikaans is part of the reason South Africa has 11 official languages.

One of the big discussion points when South Africa’s new regime was negotiated in 1992 was the status of the Afrikaans language. Afrikaner nationalists were adamant that it retained equal status to English, which is the language the ANC wanted to make the official language of the country. The ANC agreed, but couldn’t justify accepting only Afrikaans without including other indigenous languages. And from there South Africa’s inclusive approach to languages.”

“ It’s also spoken in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and – get this – Argentina!

Thought it was exclusive to South Africa? Think again. South Africa’s neighbors have a lot of Afrikaans-speaking nationals, especially Namibia. But surely the most interesting location is Argentina (more specifically Patagonia), where a small group of Afrikaans-speaking farmers reside. They are descendants of a group of about 800 families of Afrikaners who emigrated to South America between 1903 and 1909, after the Anglo-Boer War. Miraculously, the language has survived among a handful of them until now.”

Do you know these phrases?

Share your thoughts with us by making a comment at the end of this blog post. We would love to hear from you!

Enjoy! Remember to pin your favorite phrases 🙂 Please scroll down to view each phrase separately or watch the video down below to practice the pronunciation of each phrase.