Afrikaans…

I know the name of the post is Afrikaans but the post will be in English… You will realise why later.

Ok, so how many of you have heard the phrase “Afrikaans is a dying language”?  I have had quite a few heated conversations with English and Afrikaans speaking people about that exact phrase. Now I would like to point out that I am VERY proud of my mother tongue Afrikaans, and when I say VERY proud I mean it in the sense that I will level anyone who insults it with the gravel. Ek sal hul langs hul tanne laat le! So you can imagine why the conversations would be heated… saying that my mother tongue is DYING!!! What??!! Daar’s nie n manier nie!!!

Afrikaans is still a youngster. Its waaay to young to die, it hasn’t lived yet. Young meaning like about 300 years old (this is obviously before it got recognized as an official language, before that it was dutch) … I know what you are thinking that 300 years is not young but consider this, English became an official language in the 12th century but there are some English texts from the 11th. So compared to English, which is also a fairly new language, Afrikaans is young. To give you a wider perspective the Greek Language is around 3400 years old. That makes Afrikaans a baby!!

I did some research and according to the 2001 SA census about 13% of SA’s population put down Afrikaans as their mother tongue putting Afrikaans at number 3 on the log… to me that means that Afrikaans is the 3rd most spoken language in South Africa and guess what? English is NOT number one. Its not even number 2, it is NUMBER SIX… get this, English is about 8% of the country’s mother tongue. Zulu is the number one with 23%… that means its only 10% more than Afrikaans. Afrikaans and English used to be the only official languages of South Africa up until 1994 when  Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu where added. It doesn’t seem that Afrikaans is dying, and this is only in South Africa. Oh and just so you know, Afrikaans was spoken in South Africa WAAAYYYY before English. Obviously not before any of the other languages but lets face it, you don’t come across lets say for argument sake a Zulu speaking person arguing with an Afrikaans speaking person about Afrikaans being dead. Probably because they speak it themselves… (OUCH!!)

Also, I had a friend who had gone to the UK to work for a year or so and he was walking down the street and some people behind him said “kyk net die moffie” yes they said it in Afrikaans, in the UK, where English came from. I mean seriously, you can’t even gossip about someone in Afrikaans in England, how awkward.  There are even Afrikaans Schools in Perth, Australia. So I would like to point out that the language is now no longer in the hands of South Africans (meaning it WON’T die).

I do feel that Afrikaners (Afrikaans speaking South Africans) should man up and stand up for the language and not go and put their children in English schools because there is no hope for an Afrikaans person. BULL ****… Look I can understand if the family is mixed languages like the dad is English and the mom is Afrikaans or something like that but when both parents are Afrikaans and the home language is Afrikaans then WHY!!!!!

Ek is nou klaar!