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Between 1910 and 1961 Dutch was a co-official language of South Africa, together with English. In 1961 Dutch was replaced by Afrikaans as a co-official language. However, between 1925 and 1984 Dutch and Afrikaans were seen as two varieties of the same language by the Official Languages of the Union Act, 1925 and later article 119 of the South ...
South African census figures suggest a growing number of first language Afrikaans speakers in all nine provinces, a total of 6.85 million in 2011 compared to 5.98 million a decade earlier. [ 1 ] 2001 Namibian census reported that 11.4% of Namibians had Afrikaans as their home language.
The South African National Census of 2011 counted 2,710,461 white South Africans who speak Afrikaans as a first language, [2] or approximately 5.23% of the total South African population. The census also showed an increase of 5.21% in Afrikaner population compared to the previous, 2001 census.
The name of the language comes directly from the Dutch word Afrikaansch (now spelled Afrikaans) [n 3] meaning 'African'. [12] It was previously referred to as 'Cape Dutch' (Kaap-Hollands or Kaap-Nederlands), a term also used to refer to the early Cape settlers collectively, or the derogatory 'kitchen Dutch' (kombuistaal) from its use by slaves of colonial settlers "in the kitchen".
At least thirty-five languages are spoken in South Africa, twelve of which are official languages of South Africa: Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, South African Sign Language, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, and English, which is the primary language used in parliamentary and state discourse, though all official languages are equal in legal status.
In South Africa, the term premier is now more typically used in Afrikaans to refer to the head of government in each of the nine provinces, whereas eerste-minister is used for foreign leaders, and is used by the Afrikaans-language media in Namibia to refer to the country's Prime Minister. [97]
English: Density of people in South Africa who speak Afrikaans as their first language, according to Census 2011 at electoral ward level. <1 speaker/km² 1–3 speakers/km²
White South Africans are South Africans of European descent. In linguistic, cultural, and historical terms, they are generally divided into the Afrikaans-speaking descendants of the Dutch East India Company's original colonists, known as Afrikaners, and the Anglophone descendants of predominantly British colonists of South Africa.