Afrikaans And Dutch: Simplification Of a Language

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Afrikaans and Dutch: The Simplification of a Language by Francois Rousseau Afrikaans, a West Germanic language of Indo-Eurpean origin, is sometimes described as a daughter language of Dutch, and is probably the newest modern language in the world. It arose in Southern Africa, where the Dutch East India Company established a trading post in 1652, for ships plying the route between Europe and India. It is unclear when the gradual morphing from Dutch to Afrikaans reached the point where Afrikaans could be said to be a language on it’s own, but the generally accepted view is around the end of the 19th century, when the written texts started to reflect the spoken language of the people, instead of the original Dutch (Mesthrie, 2002). It was recognized as one of the official languages of South Africa in 1925. Although Afrikaans was also influenced by languages such as Malay, Portuguese, Bantu and indigenous Khoisan languages, an estimated 90 to 95 percent of Afrikaans vocabulary is ultimately of Dutch origin. Because of the necessity for the speakers of these foreign languages to learn it and use it, the Dutch language was simplified considerably over the years, with the result that the present differences between Afrikaans and Dutch often lie in a more regular morphology, grammar, and spelling (Deumert, 2004). In this paper I will compare the two languages in terms of these differences in order to show to what extent Afrikaans has been simplified from the original Dutch. Firstly, let us look at phonetics and spelling. Many Dutch consonants and clusters have come to be represented in a simplified way in Afrikaans. In the following examples I will give the Dutch spelling first, followed by the Afrikaans: • The sound [ɛi] in Dutch became in Afrikaans: o tijd –» tyd (time), kijk –» kyk (look), blijk –» blyk (seem)

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