Afrikaans language
Afrikaans is one of the 11 official languages of South Africa. Afrikaans,
or Cape Dutch, is principally derived from the Zuid-Holland (South Holland)
dialect of mid-17th-century Dutch settlers in South Africa. Dutch colonists
who came here at that time have been mixing through several centuries with
languages of other European migrants, so it gained numerous loanwords
from English, French,
and German (through settlers) and from African
languages and underwent grammatical simplification (for example, verb tense
endings were dropped). Though in the 19th century Dutch South Africa was
conquered by England, but the language did not change insrpite of many
waves of English settlers here.
Phonetic changes have occurred in the past several centuries: sch-
became sk- (Dutch schoen; Afrikaans skoen,
"shoes"), the final -t was lost after some consonants, and
so forth. Until the mid-19th century Afrikaans was a spoken language only;
Standard Dutch was used for writing. A movement then arose to make Afrikaans
a literary language. It was gradually used in newspapers, schools, and
churches, and in 1925 it officially replaced Standard Dutch in South Africa.