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, whi...
Xhosa The Xhosa are the second largest cultural group in South Africa, after the Zulu-speaking nation. The Xhosa language (Isixhosa), of which there are variations, is part of the Nguni language group. In 2006 it was determined that just over 7 million South Africans speak Xhosa as a home language. Although they speak a common language, Xhosa people belong to many loosely organized, but distinct chiefdoms that have their origins in their Nguni ancestors. It is important to question how and why the Nguni speakers were separated into the sub-group known today. The majority of central northern Nguni people became part of the Zulu kingdom, whose language and traditions are very similar to the Xhosa nations - the main difference is that the latter abolished circumcision. In order to understand the origins of the Xhosa people we must examine the developments of the southern Nguni, who intermarried with Khoikhoi (I wrote a little short story on that a while back...
Khosians In SA The Khoisan, an indigenous population in Namibia, may once have comprised the majority of living humans on the planet, for much of the past 150,000 years. The Khoisan population declined about 22,000 years ago and again during the 17th century's European colonialists' incursions into Africa. The new study by geneticists published in Nature Communications , reviewed by the journal Science, revealed that the Khoisan, now numbering about 100,000, are a genetically diverse group because of a large ancestral population in the distant past. The name ‘Khoisan’ generally refers to the hunters and herders of a number of ethnic groups that speak a distinctive click language, although it is not the name that the population use for themselves. Historically, there were two groups of peoples in the Khoisan language family, the Khoi Khoi pastoralists or herders, and the San, who were hunters and gatherers. Today, they are known collectively as the Khoisan. Khoisan...
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