Afrikaans language: Difference between revisions
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===The Soweto uprising=== | ===The Soweto uprising=== | ||
The [[Soweto uprising]] of 1976 began as a student protest against the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974. | The [[Soweto uprising]] of 1976 began as a student protest against the [[Afrikaans Medium Decree]] of 1974, which mandated that African schools implement Afrikaans as a medium of instruction from the last primary school standard through secondary school. | ||
==References== | ==References== | ||
<references/> | <references/> | ||
Revision as of 22:16, 8 July 2009
Afrikaans (in its own language: Afrikaans) is a West Germanic language that is descended from and still closely related to Dutch. It is spoken by many people in South Africa and Namibia. Although it is sometimes incorrectly referred to as a "creole", it is in fact an Ausbau language, that is a local offshoot from Dutch with a separate codification. The language retains many features in common with Dutch and remains mutually intelligible with it.
Afrikaans arose in the 17th and 18th centuries in what was then a victualing station for the Dutch East India Company (now the area around Cape Town, South Africa) out of the Zeelandic and Hollandic dialects spoken by the Dutch settlers. Through contact with native African peoples as well as other ethnic groups that had settled in the Cape colony, the spoken Dutch language of the settlers changed considerably from written Dutch. This spoken language, sometimes called Cape Dutch, developed a simplified morphology (e.g. reducing verbal and nominal inflections, reducing the number of noun genders to one) and imported considerable vocabulary from African languages as well as from Portuguese and Indonesian.
Until after the Boer Wars of the late 19th centuries, many Dutch people considered the language a dialect of Dutch. Dutch churches and other groups continued to send teachers to South Africa to teach Dutch. However, in 1925, South Africa enshrined Afrikaans, as distinct from Dutch, as one of the official languages in the country's constitution.
Afrikaans is currently one of 11 official languages of South Africa. Despite considerable loss of prestige after the end of apartheid, with which it came to be closely associated, it remains to be spoken by many people in the Northern and Western Cape provinces of the country as well as by ca. 45% of people in the adjoining country of Namibia (which was occupied and administered by South Africa from 1918-1990).
Political controversies
The Afrikaans language was at the center of several political controversies in South Africa during the twentieth century.
Language politics in the early Union period
The Soweto uprising
The Soweto uprising of 1976 began as a student protest against the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974, which mandated that African schools implement Afrikaans as a medium of instruction from the last primary school standard through secondary school.