Question

Why do some white South Africans speak Afrikaans?

Answer 1

“As far as I know both Afrikaans and English are compulsory subjects in every public school. If you go to an English school, you’ll have English as your home language, and Afrikaans as your first additional language, and vice versa. It’s a fact I thought was true for every country in the world up until I went to University, and found out very little people actually speak Afrikaans, if you add the rest of the world to the equation. So yeah, most white people in South Africa speak both languages.

And mostly it’s hard for us to tell which language is someone’s home language, unless you ask that person directly, since most of us speak both languages equally well.

It’s fun if you know a group of people really well, and there’s a mixture of Afrikaans and English home language speakers in the group, since we randomly switch between Afrikaans and English as we’re speaking to try and accommodate everyone.

And usually if I’m telling a story to the group that involved most members of the group, I switch languages so everyone hears their contribution to that story in their own language, and can correct me if I get something wrong. It’s really fun for all of us that way, since even if someone might be struggling with one language or the other for some reason, they can still follow along and contribute to the conversation.

To me it’s also important that we try and speak both languages on campus, since my Afrikaans did suffer when I went home for the first time at the start off last year. I hadn’t been speaking Afrikaans for weeks during that time until I finally went home, and had started to somehow develop a weird kind of accent. I only realized this when I spoke to my parents and ‘their’ speech seemed to be weird yet familiar”.