Afrikaans · Afrikaans

About Afrikaans

Language family

Indo-European, West Germanic

Where it's spoken

South Africa, Namibia

Speakers

roughly 7 million native speakers and 10–15 million total

Afrikaans developed from the Dutch dialects brought by 17th-century settlers to the Cape, reshaped through sustained contact with Malay, Khoisan, Bantu, and Portuguese-creole-speaking communities into a grammatically simplified daughter language. It dropped much of Dutch's verb conjugation and noun-gender system, making its grammar notably more regular than its parent language. It remains one of South Africa's most widely understood languages across racial and regional lines.