Afrikaans

High school (ages 12+)
People & Society

Name:

Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/afrikaans

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. What is the language family classification?West Germanic language
2. What is the primary geographic distribution?South Africa and Namibia
3. Where did Afrikaans come from?It grew in the Dutch Cape Colony during the 17th and 18th centuries. Dutch settlers and people from Africa and Asia mixed their speech there.
4. Why does Afrikaans sound different from Dutch?Afrikaans simplified its grammar, dropping many Dutch endings. It also added words from Malay, Khoisan, and other languages.

West Germanic: A major branch of the Germanic language family, encompassing languages like English, German, and Dutch, characterized by specific phonetic and grammatical developments.
Dutch Cape Colony: The historical Dutch settlement established at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, serving as the primary cradle for the development of Afrikaans.
Analytic Morphology: A grammatical system that relies heavily on word order and auxiliary words rather than inflectional endings to convey grammatical relationships.
Mutual Intelligibility: The degree to which speakers of different languages or dialects can understand each other without prior study.