Afrikaans: An African Language With a Complicated History

Ask people outside South Africa about Afrikaans, and many will link it immediately to apartheid — the language of the white minority government, and of the decree that sparked the 1976 Soweto uprising. That history is real. But it is only part of the story. Afrikaans is also the language of millions of people of colour, and its roots lie as much in the homes of enslaved people and Khoekhoe communities as in the farms of Dutch settlers.

Born at the Cape

In 1652, the Dutch East India Company established a station at the Cape of Good Hope to supply its ships. The settlers spoke Dutch. But the Cape quickly became a meeting place of many languages:

• Khoekhoe languages spoken by the region's original inhabitants;
• Malay, Portuguese creole and languages from Indonesia, India, Madagascar and East Africa, spoken by enslaved people brought to the Cape;
• later, Bantu languages such as isiXhosa, and English.

Over the following generations, the Dutch spoken at the Cape changed: grammar simplified, vocabulary borrowed from other languages, and pronunciation shifted. Many of the people who shaped this new way of speaking were enslaved people, Khoekhoe and their descendants, who used Cape Dutch as a common language. By the 19th century, it was clearly a distinct language — Afrikaans, meaning "African."

Written first in Arabic script

One of the most surprising facts about Afrikaans is that some of its earliest written texts were in Arabic script. In the 19th century, Cape Muslim communities — many descended from enslaved people and political exiles from Southeast Asia — wrote religious texts in Afrikaans using Arabic letters, a tradition known as Arabic-Afrikaans. These documents are among the earliest examples of Afrikaans written as a language in its own right.

A language of nationalism — and of oppression

In the late 19th and 20th centuries, white Afrikaner nationalists promoted Afrikaans as a symbol of their identity, distinct from English and Dutch. It became an official language of South Africa in 1925, and after 1948, the language of the apartheid state, alongside English.

In 1976, the government ordered that Black pupils be taught certain subjects in Afrikaans. On 16 June 1976, students in Soweto marched in protest. Police opened fire, killing schoolchildren, including 12-year-old Hector Pieterson, whose photograph became world-famous. The uprising spread across the country. Today, 16 June is Youth Day in South Africa.

Who speaks Afrikaans today?

Census data show roughly 7 million South Africans speak Afrikaans at home — and, importantly, most of them are not white. A large share of first-language speakers are Coloured South Africans, especially in the Western and Northern Cape. Afrikaans is also widely spoken in Namibia, where it is a common language between different communities.

There are many varieties. Kaaps, the Afrikaans of Cape Flats communities, has its own rich vocabulary and rhythms, and in recent years writers, poets and rappers have celebrated it as a language of creativity and resistance.

Reclaiming the story

Scholars and writers have increasingly argued that Afrikaans should not be seen only as an "oppressor's language." Its history includes the voices of enslaved people, Khoekhoe, Muslims and working-class communities — those whom apartheid tried to exclude. That history is part of the wider story of how languages in southern Africa have mixed and borrowed from each other, as with the click sounds isiXhosa took from the Khoe and San, discussed in our story on isiXhosa.

Why it matters

Afrikaans shows that languages do not belong to just one group, and that the same words can carry both pain and pride. Understanding its full history — from the kitchens of enslaved people to the streets of Soweto in 1976 to the poets of the Cape Flats — is part of understanding South Africa itself.

Further reading

• Hein Willemse, More than an Oppressor's Language: Reclaiming the Hidden History of Afrikaans (2017, The Conversation)
• Achmat Davids, The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims (Protea Book House, 2011)
• Statistics South Africa — Census language data