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Afrikaans, a language primarily descended from Dutch, is the mother tongue of Afrikaners and most Cape Coloureds. [10] According to the South African National Census of 2022, 10.6% of South Africans claimed to speak Afrikaans as a first language at home, making it the third most widely spoken home language in the country. [11]
The name of the language comes directly from the Dutch word Afrikaansch (now spelled Afrikaans) [n 4] 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".
The history of the indigenous African peoples spans thousands of years and includes a complex variety of cultures, languages, and political systems. Indigenous African cultures have existed since ancient times, with some of the earliest evidence of human life on the continent coming from stone tools and rock art dating back hundreds of thousands of years.
The official population count of the various ethnic groups in Africa is highly uncertain due to limited infrastructure to perform censuses, and due to rapid population growth. Some groups have alleged that there is deliberate misreporting in order to give selected ethnicities numerical superiority (as in the case of Nigeria's Hausa, Fulani ...
An indigenous language, or autochthonous language, is a language that is native to a region and spoken by its indigenous peoples. Indigenous languages are not necessarily national languages but they can be; for example, Aymara is both an indigenous language and an official language of Bolivia. Also, national languages are not necessarily ...
Sign language systems extant in Africa include the Paget Gorman Sign System used in Namibia and Angola, the Sudanese Sign languages used in Sudan and South Sudan, the Arab Sign languages used across the Arab Mideast, the Francosign languages used in Francophone Africa and other areas such as Ghana and Tunisia, and the Tanzanian Sign languages ...
It includes countries, which have Afrikaans and/or Dutch as (one of) their nationwide official language(s), as well as dependent territories with Afrikaans and/or Dutch as a co-official language. Worldwide, Afrikaans and Dutch as native or second language are spoken by approximately 46 million people.
[citation needed] According to the 2022 census, one of the top three most spoken languages is Afrikaans (10,6%). The first census in South Africa in 1911 showed that Whites made up 22% of the population; who declined to 16% in 1980. [24] The white population decreased further in the 1990s and 2000s due to a low birth rate and emigration.