For about 50 years of the last century the Afrikaans language represented repression and everything that was wrong with South Africa. On 16 June 1976, groups of black students in Soweto and other townships around South Africa protested at having to be taught in Afrikaans. The though owes its existence to blacks.

Die Taal developed in two different streams, the one black and the other white. Afrikaans has been entangled in politics- used, some would say abused- as a tool by the white mostly Afrikaner nationalist government to impose its will on those it wished to opress.

Afrikaans- although not having an identity yet- had its origins in the then Cape Colony where people from all over the world converged, some forcibly brought to these shores others, like sailors, seeking fame and wealth. The slaves at the Cape who came from places like East Africa, Madagascar, Ceylon and the Indonesian archipelago needed to speak a common language. Mixing all their languages together a form of Creole Dutch emerged spoken by the new arrivals to the colony including Protestant Huguenot settlers from France.

The first written Afrikaans appeared only in 1861- much simpler than Dutch, the grammar for instance had been simplified so that words were spelt as they sounded- there’s a saying in Afrikaans, “Ons skryf soos ons praat”. Indeed Afrikaans grammar is more relaxed compared to its other language cousins like German or Dutch which are complex.

Words like piesang, rottang and blatjang owe their existence to the Malay-speaking slaves. Visit the Bo-Kaap in Cape Town, formerly known as the Malay Quarter, and you might find the locals using more Malay words. These words link them to their ancestors, though not all Malay, they spoke a common language.

With people moving out of the Cape, the language got influenced by other languages as the settlers made contact with indigenous people. Many words in the Xhosa, Sotho and Tswana languages owe their existence to Afrikaans- although it had not acquired its current name by then. Asked what language they spoke, people at the Cape would more often answer, “Cape Dutch” in the nineteenth century.

Its vocabulary is essentially similar to that of Dutch; Afrikaans has also absorbed quite a few words from the Khoisan languages like haai-khona, and Bantu (such as words designating local flora and fauna), and English.

From this, three main dialects emerged, Cape Afrikaans, Orange River Afrikaans and Eastern Border Afrikaans. The Cape dialect is mostly infused with the language spoken by the Malay slaves who worked in the Cape and spoke a form of broken Portuguese, the Orange River dialect developed with the influence of Khoi languages and dialects developed in the Namakwaland and Griqualand West regions and the Eastern Border Afrikaans evolved from the settlers who moved East towards Natal from the Cape.