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The South African National Census of 2011 counted 2,710,461 white South Africans who speak Afrikaans as a first language, [2] or approximately 5.23% of the total South African population. The census also showed an increase of 5.21% in Afrikaner population compared to the previous, 2001 census.
The name of the language comes directly from the Dutch word Afrikaansch (now spelled Afrikaans) [n 4] meaning 'African'. [12] It was previously referred to as 'Cape Dutch' (Kaap-Hollands or Kaap-Nederlands), a term also used to refer to the early Cape settlers collectively, or the derogatory 'kitchen Dutch' (kombuistaal) from its use by slaves of colonial settlers "in the kitchen".
Worldwide, Afrikaans and Dutch as native or second language are spoken by approximately 46 million people. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages, [1] [2] [3] particularly in written form.
At the end of words, Afrikaans often dropped the n in the Dutch cluster en (pronounced as a schwa, [ə]), mainly present in plural nouns and verb forms, to become e Compare Dutch leven (life) and mensen (people) to Afrikaans lewe and mense. Also in Dutch, final -n is often deleted after a schwa, but the occurrence and frequency of this ...
The settlements thrived and expanded, and Kat River quickly became a large and successful region of the Cape that subsisted more or less autonomously. The people were predominantly Afrikaans-speaking Gonaqua Khoi, but the settlement also began to attract other Khoi, Xhosa and mixed-race groups of the Cape.
Overall 15 to 20 million people are estimated to speak Afrikaans. Since the colonial era, Indo-European languages such as Afrikaans, English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish have held official status in many countries, and are widely spoken, generally as lingua francas. (See African French and African Portuguese.) Additionally ...
The majority of Coloureds in South Africa speak Afrikaans as their home language, while a smaller minority of the Coloureds speak English as their home language. [129] Most English-speaking Coloureds live in KwaZulu-Natal (especially in its biggest city, Durban ) mainly because of their partial British heritage that is mainly mixed with Zulu ...
Afrikaners and Coloured South-Africans mainly speak Afrikaans, a daughter language and variant of Dutch from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with loanwords from English, Malay, German, and to a lesser extent also Khoi, San and also from some Bantu languages.