ABSTRACT
The Afrikaans language is a Western Germanic subgroup of the Indo-European family language group. The language began as pidgin spoken between the 16th century Dutch colonizers of the Dutch East India Company, the Malay and the S. A. Khoi and San. The first major British immigration to the Eastern Cape in 1820 was made up primarily of middle and lower middle class families from Southern England. The next immigration in 1850 brought middle and upper middle class families from Northern England. English was declared the official language in 1822. From 1910-1925, Dutch and English were the official languages; Afrikaans replaced Dutch in 1925. In 1948 when the Afrikaans National Party took control and pushed its apartheid policy on the country, Afrikaans became the ruling language of the whites even though there were more Cape Coloured speakers at the time.
