Afrikaners in South Africa

 Afrikaners in SA


Afrikaners are a Southern African ethnic group descended from predominantly Dutch settlers first arriving in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They traditionally dominated South Africa's agriculture and politics prior to 1994. Afrikaans, South Africa's third-most widely spoken home language, is the mother tongue of Afrikaners and most Cape Coloureds. It evolved from the Dutch vernacular of South Holland, incorporating words brought from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and Madagascar by slaves. Afrikaners make up approximately 5.2% of the total South African population based on the number of white South Africans who speak Afrikaans as a first language in the South African National Census of 2011.

Afrikaans/ Afrikaners in the Cape
The Afrikaans dialect spoken today originates from the Dutch language spoken by early settlers in the 1600s. However, modern Afrikaans is in fact an accumulation of many other influences, which include other languages, both foreign and indigenous.
The influence of other languages on the development of the Afrikaans dialect began after 1652, when sailors who had been shipwrecked off the Cape coast incorporated terms and phrases into the dialect. This influence was significant, as many ships passed through the Cape after a trade route via the horn of Africa became viable. These phrases, both English and Portuguese in origin, soon found their way into the then predominantly Dutch dialect.

At this stage, before Afrikaans became an established and written language, it was referred to as Cape Dutch or Kitchen Dutch. This is because it acted mainly as a spoken language for people living in the Cape, with Dutch used as the formal and written language. The first known example of written Afrikaans appeared in a poem dated 7 August 1795, written about the Battle of Muizenberg. Other early work in Afrikaans included the use of the Arabic alphabet, for example in the work Bayaan-ud-djyn written by Abu Bakr in the mid 1800s.
The Afrikaans dialect took on a different flavour with the arrival of slaves in the Cape. Naturally, they all spoke different African and Asian languages, depending on their origins. Slaves from India and the East Indies for example, spoke a mixture of Indian and Indonesian languages. All these languages, accents, dialects and phrases, along with Khoikhoi dialects, began to influence the way people communicated on the farms. Mixed with Dutch and German, the result became a dialect known as Afrikaans. This dialect was further developed by Huguenot settlers, who contributed different words to the Afrikaans vocabulary, and altered the sounds of certain words.

These Huguenots, along with other Free Burghers, had been granted rights to land by the VOC management (1652-1795), and began farming to generate income. In the area of the Cape Peninsula, where they had limited access to education and cultural opportunities, these Free Burghers soon established grain and wine farms, which thrived due to favourable economic conditions.
In order to maintain these farms, slaves were imported for manual labour from the East. According to records, by 1170 there were 8104 slaves versus 7949 burghers with their families in the Cape. As these slaves were also employed as domestic servants, aspects of Eastern culture such as music, food dishes and words became an intrinsic part of the developing Afrikaner culture.

They have a very beautiful background. Afikaners fill almost 8.9 percent of South Africa's population. Afrikaners can b found basically in all of the Southern Africa except Zimbabwe (reason being why not Zimbabwe because of Mugabe). I personally love they're history. One history I love the most is the Coloreds history.
South Africa has te potential to do great. We should stop complaining and move. The US is striving but has a crap government, but why. Well the power is within the people. That's what SA should realize.