Some of the earliest Afrikaans writing used Arabic script, not Latin letters
From about 1815, Muslim schools at the Cape began teaching in Afrikaans instead of Malay, writing it in Arabic letters. Those lessons are among the oldest known Afrikaans texts, produced when the colony's settlers still wrote in standard Dutch. The language's roots run through slaves, Khoisan people and settlers alike.
Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that grew out of the Dutch dialects brought to South Africa from the 17th century, mainly Hollandic and Zeelandic, blended with Dutch-based creoles spoken by Khoisan, Nguni and Coloured communities. Roughly 90 to 95 per cent of its words are Dutch in origin, with borrowings from German, Malay and Khoisan languages, and Dutch readers can follow written Afrikaans fairly easily. Its name simply means African; older labels included Cape Dutch and the disparaging kitchen Dutch, from its use by enslaved domestic workers.
Enslaved people brought from Madagascar, Mughal India, both coasts of Africa and what is now Indonesia all shaped it. The linguist M. F. Valkhoff argued that three quarters of children born to enslaved women at the Cape between 1652 and 1672 had Dutch fathers, and scholars Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman argue that people learning Dutch as a second language heavily conditioned its growth.
The textbook story has changed. Christo van Rensburg's Eastern Border Hypothesis long held that a fairly pure frontier dialect stabilised around 1775 while other varieties creolised. Newer research paints a messier picture: until the early 20th century South Africa held a patchwork of communities, some speaking near-European Dutch and others using it as a second or third language, with choices shaped by class and race. A mocking anonymous poem from 1795 is the earliest deliberate imitation of local speech.
Standardisation then moved quickly. A society founded in 1875 set out to turn the spoken tongue into a written one, the first grammar followed in 1876, and a simplified spelling adopted in 1905 laid the base for modern orthography. On 8 May 1925 a law recognised it officially, and a monument above Paarl opened on 10 October 1975. It is now South Africa's third most common home language: speakers fell from 14.5 per cent of the population in 1996 to 10.6 per cent in 2022, even as their number rose to about 6.3 million.
Source: Afrikaans
