My Sweet Wonderful Language - AFRIKAANS!!!!

 I am a South African and my language is Afrikaans of which I am very proud of!!!! English is only my second language. Here is the story of my beautiful language: 

The story of Afrikaans is a rich and diverse one with a complex history and a sense of cultural distinctness. Afrikaans, also known as Cape Dutch, is a West-Germanic language. In South Africa alone, Afrikaans is spoken by about 7 million as a first language and by approximately 10 million people as a second language. It is also spoken in Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia as well as other continents as a home or second language.

Afrikaans is a creole language that evolved during the 19th century. The majority of its roots can be found in Dutch. While the rest is a mixture of seafarer variants of Malay, Portuguese and Indonesian and the indigenous Khoi-Khoin and San languages.

In 1860 the Muslim community established a school (madrasah) in the Bo-Kaap. Fragments of an exercise book (called a ‘koplesboek’ then) that survived the times, contain text written in Cape Malay dialect. Cape Malay dialect was the colloquial language of the time. The writing style is phonetic spelling and written in Arabic script. Afrikaans readers will recognise this as a form of modern Afrikaans. Arabic-Afrikaans was also used in daily communication. During this time several Islamic religious texts were translated into Arabic-Afrikaans. The first Afrikaans translation of the Quran came from this school and was done by Achmat van Bengal.

For Cape Dutch speakers, their language was one of learning, writing and upper-middle-class culture. Though this sentiment was not shared by everyone. Chief Justice Lord JH de Villiers described Cape Dutch as “poor in the number of its words, weak in its inflexions, wanting in the accuracy of meaning.” (Source: The Afrikaners: Biography of a People by Prof Hermann Giliomee).

In 1858 a private school, De Gimnasium, with Dutch as the language of instruction, was established in Paarl. This school was for the Afrikaans-speaking children. In 1866, a teacher called Arnoldus Pannevis realised that the language spoken by the people were far removed from Dutch. Pannevis was the first person to call it by its name: Afrikaans. He wanted to establish Afrikaans as a written language too. The deeply religious Pannevis was eager to translate the Bible into Afrikaans. The Bible Society instructed SJ du Toit to look into this.

Around 1870 the first steps towards the battle between various views on the nature of Cape Dutch were taken. This lead to the establishment of The Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners (GRA) in 1875. The objective was to promote Afrikaans as a language and to support the Afrikaans culture as a whole. The GRA declared their own version of Cape Dutch as “Burger Afrikaans”. They wanted to write Afrikaans as it was spoken and drafted a set of spelling and grammar rules. The newspaper, “Die Patriot” (The Patriot), originated in 1876, to be a spokesman of these language rules. Worth noting is that the first Afrikaans newspaper was published in 1859 already. The newspaper, “De Bode”, was published by the Moravian Mission station in Genadendal. It already then printed articles and letters from readers in Afrikaans.

In 1882, an Afrikaans school, the Gedenkschool der Hugenoten, was established on the farm Kleinbosch in Daljosafat, Paarl. This gave Afrikaans an important boost and was an important step towards recognising Afrikaans as the official language of instruction at school.

Many Afrikaans-speaking people still believed that Afrikaans was an inferior language, though they themselves did not speak Dutch. To them, Dutch was a status symbol – a connection to a world of literature and science outside of South Africa. In 1906, Eugene Marais trumped the argument of the pro-Dutch that Afrikaans had no literature value with his poem Winternag. Jan FE Celliers followed with Die Vlakte as did many other writers and poets.

From 1908, Afrikaans flourished in the arts. In 1909 the Zuid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Lettere en Kunst deur Afrikaners was established. Their objective was to establish Afrikaans as a higher-order language. They managed to regulate language matters through a Spelling Committee, later called the Die Taalkommissie (The Language Commission). Gone were the days of the GRA’s write-as-we-speak. The first Woordelys en Spelreëls was published in 1917. Through this, the pro-Dutch got what they wanted. Afrikaans displayed a strong Dutch influence in the way sentences and words were constructed. Afrikaans dialects and the language as spoken by the so-called workers class were deemed inferior. The result of this pro-Dutch movement is that even today many Dutch words can be found in Afrikaans, which creates the impression that Afrikaans originated from Dutch – though untrue.

Afrikaans was established as the scientific language at four universities. It was also the language used in the civil service, courts, in literature, films and for broadcasting.

The Afrikaanse Taalmonument in Paarl was inaugurated in 1975 – 100 years after the founding of the GRA. The idea to build a monument for the Afrikaans language was first mentioned in 1942. However, construction only started in late 1972 and was completed at the end of 1974.

After 1994 Afrikaans was one of the 11 official languages. In 2010 Prof. Kwesi Prah from Ghana described the development of Afrikaans as one of the three language wonders of the world. In only 50 years, Afrikaans evolved from the vernacular, or so-called kitchen language to a higher order academic and economic language that can hold its own on the world stage.

Currently Afrikaans as an instruction language in schools and universities is under immense pressure from the ANC government because just like the British colonialist of the 1800’s and 1900’s they believe that if you can suppress a language you also suppress the people speaking that language. However, just like the British the ANC will learn the hard way not to suppress the Afrikaner language or the Afrikaner!!!!!

Afrikaans is my Mother Tongue and nobody, but nobody will deny me the right to speak it! 

Danie de Villiers