November 27, 2009

Afrikaans: South Africa

Afrikaans is the language of the Afrikaner and originated in South Africa when Dutch Settlers were required to communicate with the native Khoi Khoi people, French Protestant refugees, (known as the Huguenots), Portuguese sailors and slaves from Malaysia and Madagascar. Afrikaans is spoken worldwide by 6.2 million people and remains one of the most frequently used home languages in South Africa (UCLA, 2009).


Inge Aldum is a fluent speaker of Afrikaans and English and a speech pathologist working in Perth, Australia. Inge is my honours student and we are researching speech acquisition of bilingual Afrikaans-English speaking children in Australia.