Afrikaans

Afrikaans-Speaking World

Afrikaans is an Indo-European language mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia, with smaller numbers of speakers in Botswana, Angola, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Zambia.

Due to emigration and migrant labor, there are possibly over 100,000 Afrikaans speakers in the United Kingdom, with other substantial communities found in Brussels, Amsterdam, Perth (Australia), Mount Isa, Toronto and Auckland. It is the primary language used by two related ethnic groups in South Africa: the Afrikaners and the Coloureds or kleurlinge or bruinmense (including Basters, Cape Malays and Griqua).

Geographically, the Afrikaans language is the majority language of the western one-third of South Africa (Northern and Western Cape, spoken at home by 69% and 58%, respectively). It is also the largest first language in the adjacent southern third of Namibia (Hardap and Karas, where it is the first language of 44% and 40%, respectively).

Afrikaans and Dutch are largely mutually intelligible (speakers can make themselves understood). Afrikaans was considered a Dutch dialect until the late 19th century, when it began to be recognized as a distinct language, and it gained equal status with Dutch and English as an official language in South Africa in 1925.

Afrikaans Learning Resources

Podcasts for Afrikaans Learners

Podcasts are a great way to learn languages. You can use Free Language to check the vitality of available Afrikaans language-learning podcasts by viewing their feed page. Click on any podcast below to view general info followed by the latest items from it's feed. You can tell if the feed has been updated lately, and it'll save you some time in choosing which podcasts to subscribe to.

I'm still looking for a good podcast for Afrikaans learners. Drop me a line if you know one.

News in Afrikaans

News feeds from around the Afrikaans-speaking world provide language exposure and practice joined with current events, culture, politics, science, sports and more. At Free Language, you can view summaries of these feeds and jump to view full articles when your interest is piqued.

Afrikaans Internet TV

Watching people speak Afrikaans is a good way to gain exposure to the language in a non-study environment. This is great for folks who aren't living where the language is spoken and especially those already proficient in listening comprehension. If you don't understand anything, it's cool to "vegg out" for a while, but it's not the most productive thing you can do to learn. Try to find something with subtitles, and you're on the way. ;)

If you do get into Internet TV, I highly recommend Miro, a free and open source media player with multimedia RSS capability that supports Linux, Mac and Windows. Hey, "because open media matters."

At any rate, below you'll find resources with literally thousands of Internet TV stations in a wide variety of languages. Amongst them you'll find Afrikaans. Enjoy!

Make Friends Learning Afrikaans

Social language learning has become incredibly popular on the web as it has transcended language barriers in previously impossible ways. Right now someone in South Africa is could be interested in teaching you Afrikaans in exchange for your English skills. If you speak other languages, the odds are even better that you'll find someone interested in a language exchange.

Note that not all networks below support Afrikaans. Collectively, though, they support pretty much every language.

Subscribe to Afrikaans Updates

Get all the latest Afrikaans language resources from Free Language delivered to your RSS reader or inbox. Click here to subscribe.

Don't know what RSS is? Click here and it could save you plenty of time. And perhaps revolutionize your web experience.

Afrikaans Aggregator

Free Language aggregates (brings together) web feeds in about about the Afrikaans language for the purpose of exposing users to content in this language. Not only that, users interested in getting this dynamic combo of Afrikaans feeds in on single RSS feed can click here and sit back. :)

Best of Luck!

I wish you the best of luck in your language-learning endeavors! Please send me suggestions about resources and improving this website.