Ferdi's Musings

Afrikaans is my mother tongue, a beautiful¹ and very expressive language. It is the youngest language in the world.

Some of my musings will be in Afrikaans and available under the Afrikaans tab. Interested readers can use Google’s language tools to attempt a translation. The results may be amusing, but you’ll get the gist.

Genealogy:
Indo-European → Germanic → Western → Low German → Low Franconian →
Dutch → Afrikaans

Afrikaans derives mainly from Dutch, with lots of influence from Bantu and Khoisan languages as well as from Malay, German, French and Portuguese. Afrikaans is spoken by about 10 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia, but also by emigrants from South Africa living in the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and many other countries.

Read more about Afrikaans at Wikipedia and Omniglot. If you want to learn Afrikaans, the Free Language site offers lots of material and links.

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¹In the September 2005 edition of Wallpaper*, a glossy international design magazine, a caption under a picture of the Afrikaans Language Monument in Paarl opined that “architect Jan van Wijk’s remarkable 1975 tribute to one of the world’s ugliest languages makes, if nothing else, a great picnic spot on the way to the wine lands of Franschhoek and Stellenbosch.” See Controversy over Afrikaans and the subsequent reaction from several South Africans. The controversial opinion is attributed to one Bronwyn Davies, an English-speaking South African. In fact, according to Rapport, the responsible person is editor Richard Cook, who asked freelance writer Davies about her experiences living in Cape Town.