ABSTRACT
Language of the Boers in South Africa which derived from Dutch dialects of the seventeenth century and has been used as a written language since 1875. Afrikaans is the only creole that has been elevated to an official language (1926-along with English, in the Republic of South Africa and in Namibia); approx. 5 million speakers. The vocabulary and orthography of Afrikaans were determined by colloquial Dutch at the time of South Africa’s colonization. Structurally, Afrikaans demonstrates even more morphological simplicity than Dutch (e.g. loss of endings in conjugation and declension, cf. Afrk. sy loop vs Du. zij lopen ‘they run’).
