Today, as our hopes are with Nelson Mandela who is spending his 95th birthday isolated in a Pretorian hospital room, I decided to show my respect towards him by presenting something “South Africa-related”. I have always been interested in the history of the Afrikaans language and the extent of its mutual intelligibility with the parent language, Dutch. For those of you who are even less familiar with the topic than I am, Afrikaans (or ‘Cape Dutch’) is actually a dialect of the well-known West Germanic language, which happens to be considered a separate standard language rather than a national variety for a number of historical reasons. So how has Afrikaans developed? And what makes it so unique? Continue reading
I wish to be a polyglot! 