What do people think of afrikaans

White South Africans retain the vast majority of wealth and financial influence in the country and are an ethnic minority, making up just 8. Although the system of apartheid formally ended at the start of the s, its legacy today has been largely to continue to keep South Africans geographically segregated by race, with exceptional pockets of cosmopolitan blending in some urban areas of cities such as Johannesburg.

As a result, most white South Africans live in close-knit suburban or rural communities where they rarely come into contact with their non-white fellow citizens outside of transactional settings with domestic workers, in shops or in restaurants. They tend not to speak any black African languages. Is Afrikaans' future in rural pockets that resist the seismic changes in the country?

Credit: Getty Images. How white Afrikaans speakers see the future of their own language in South Africa varies greatly. All our traditions were being undone. Hoogenboezem now lives in Orania, a small yet controversial, exclusively-white settlement of 1, Afrikaners in the vast and dusty Karoo region in the centre of the country. Many South Africans view Orania with suspicion, seeing it as a nostalgic attempt to restore apartheid-era racial segregation in the 21st Century.

Meyrick Tree, also 24, a waiter and native Afrikaans speaker from Johannesburg, studied Afrikaans literature at university and suggests there may be a fundamental difference of opinion in the way people see the future of the language. Yet for people like me, we see our role as transforming what it means to be an Afrikaner to make it something that can sit comfortably alongside other languages and cultures in a diverse and democratic South Africa.

Join one million Future fans by liking us on Facebook , or follow us on Twitter or Instagram. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. I mean what the hell is a spijkerbroek?! Mega Ja, verseker.

Die man se broek se gulp is seker permanent oop met sy wors wat uithang. Jammer, ek moes net. MikaelaVerster 'Nee' Nederlands klink soos naai. The one learning a language! Tired of searching? HiNative can help you find that answer you're looking for. They played a major role in its establishment as the language of trade, culture and education.

However, not everyone thought that Cape Dutch could express learning, writing or upper middle class culture. It was derided by the upper classes of the Cape Colony, be they Dutch or English-speaking.

Around the first steps towards the battle between various views on the nature of Cape Dutch, or what would become known as Afrikaans, were taken.

They sought to write a nationalist history of oppressors and victims also Giliomee. Doggedly, these early Afrikaner language nationalists and their successors modified, standardised and modernised a spoken language. The racial prejudice and middle class bias underlying many of their choices had far-reaching implications.

In denying the commonality of their fellow Afrikaans speakers who were descendants of slaves, indigenous people or simply poor, they were elevating the language to a narrow ethnic nationalist cause.

In a disastrous policy decision, Afrikaans was imposed as a language of instruction on black, non-Afrikaans speakers in The impact was the point of ignition for the Soweto uprising in and along with it, suspicion of its speakers. The slogan was rightly an emotive, visceral response to Afrikaner ethnic, nationalist hegemony and its concomitant coercive state power.

However, it also obscured the experiences, lives and histories of black and non-nationalist Afrikaans speakers. Today, more than two decades into a democratic South Africa, Afrikaner nationalism has been severely diminished and along with it the standing of Afrikaans in the public sector.

Nonetheless, in the private spheres of culture, private education, the media and subscription television Afrikaans has seen an exponential growth. Yet Afrikaans has a multifaceted nature , numerically dominated by its black speakers.