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German is especially widely used in central and southern Namibia and was until 1990 one of three official languages in what was then South West Africa, alongside Afrikaans and English, two other Germanic languages in Namibia. German is the mother tongue of German Namibians as well as older black speakers of Namibian Black German and Black ...
German family in Keetmanshoop, 1926. Today, English is the country's sole official language, but about 30,000 Namibians of German descent (around 2% of the country's overall population) and possibly 15,000 black Namibians (many of whom returned from East Germany after Namibian independence) still speak German or Namibian Black German, respectively. [1]
Namibian Black German, also NBG, (German: Küchendeutsch, "kitchen German") is a pidgin language of Namibia that derives from standard German. [1] It is nearly extinct. [ 2 ] It was spoken mostly by Namibians who did not learn standard German during the period of German rule .
Although the number of Angolans in Namibia declined from 2014 to 2015, affected by the neighbouring country's economic crisis, there are still around 100,000 Portuguese speakers in Namibia as of 2024, equivalent to 3.3% of the country's population. [6] [7] [8] The language is now offered as an optional subject in many schools throughout the ...
Today, German is used in myriad spheres, especially business and tourism, as well as churches (most notably the German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (GELK)), schools (e.g., the Deutsche Höhere Privatschule Windhoek), literature (German-Namibian authors include Giselher W. Hoffmann ), radio (the Namibian Broadcasting ...
These countries (with the addition of South Tyrol of Italy) also form the Council for German Orthography and are referred to as the German Sprachraum (German language area). Since 2004, Meetings of German-speaking countries have been held annually with six participants: Germany, Austria, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland: [1]
About 30,000 people still speak German as a native tongue today, mostly descendants of German colonial settlers. [46] The period of German colonialism in Namibia also led to the evolution of a Standard German-based pidgin language called "Namibian Black German", which became a second language for parts of the indigenous population. Although it ...
Roughly speaking, Germanic languages differ in how conservative or how progressive each language is with respect to an overall trend toward analyticity. Some, such as Icelandic and, to a lesser extent, German, have preserved much of the complex inflectional morphology inherited from Proto-Germanic (and in turn from Proto-Indo-European).