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Afrikaans

Spoken in the Republic of South Africa.

Afrikaans (or Cape Dutch) is principally derived from the South Holland dialect of mid-17th-century Dutch settlers in South Africa. It gained borrowings from English , French , and German (through settlers) and from African languages.

Afrikaans has been simplified grammatical compared with the original Dutch. Phonetic changes have also also occurred: sch- became sk- (eg Dutch schoen; Afrikaans skoen , "shoes"), final t was lost after some consonants.

 

Name Where spoken Language Family How many (000s)
 Afrikaans South Africa, Namibia Indo-European (Germanic) 4-5m

Table source: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, David Ctystal, Cambridge University Press

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