Introduction

Afrikaans developed in South Africa out of a Dutch stem as a result of interaction between European colonists, who arrived there in 1652, slaves imported from Africa and Asia, and indigenous Khoisan people. By the 1930s there were fewer than two million people who spoke Afrikaans as a first language. Yet the language would achieve something exceptional.
Heinz Kloss observed in 1977: ‘Unless we consider Arabic an African tongue … Afrikaans is the only non-European/non-Asiatic language to have attained full university status and to be used in all branches of life and learning … All other university languages have their main basis in either
Europe or Asia.’ He added: ‘There is a strong likelihood that of the new university languages outside Europe (new ones as against old ones such as Japanese, Arabic or Chinese) only Hindi, used by some 250 million speakers, Indonesian by 100 million speakers, and Hebrew match the development of Afrikaans.’1

Jean Laponce, author of Languages and Territories, remarks that Afrikaans, Hindi, Indonesian, and Hebrew, are possibly the only languages that in the course of the twentieth century were standardized and came to be used in all branches of life and learning, including in both undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, and in science and technology. 2 In 1994 the sociologist Lawrence Schlemmer concluded that Afrikaans, though spoken as a first language by only six million people forming 15 percent of the population, was the strongest language in South Africa in the way it was used formally and informally. 3

This article offers a historical account of how Afrikaans reached the position described by Kloss, Laponce and Schlemmer. It also asks why there is a real risk that it may disappear as a public language over the medium to long term.

Read the full article here: The Rise and Possible Demise of Afrikaans as a Public Language