Talk:Afrikaans

Geographic distribution

Is it relevant to point out that there are 36 speakers in Mauritius and 122 in Finland? I think we should stick to countries that have at least 1,000 speakers on the table. 2600:1702:6D0:5160:59CC:F3DA:7940:1F39 (talk) 01:51, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

Agree, it's equally strange that the (alleged, I don't know) 30,000 speakers in the Netherlands are only mentioned somewhere else in the text, not in that table. Joekiedoe (talk) 11:15, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure there aren't 54 million native speakers — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:A03F:8185:5900:D539:399:882D:11D7 (talk) 14:24, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Error(s) with respect to diminutive forms

The current article text contains:

”The diminutive suffix in Afrikaans is -tjie, -djie or -ie, whereas in Dutch it is -tje or dje, hence a "bit" is ʼn bietjie in Afrikaans and beetje in Dutch.”

This contains certainly one error and probably several errors.

• There is definitely no Dutch diminutive suffix form “-dje”. If “dje” occurs as the last part of a diminutive form, the “d” is part of the root of the word, e.g. liedje, lidje, leedje, ledje, meidje, stuudje, studje, huidje, bloedje, broodje, bodje, woudje, paadje, padje, deugdje, voogdje, maagdje, smaragdje, schildje, beeldje, speldje, schuldje, koboldje, naaldje, wereldje, beemdje, hemdje, vriendje, kindje, eendje, endje, eindje, rundje, hondje, maandje, mandje, duizendje, zwoerdje, lieverdje, nerdje, boordje, bordje, gaardje, gardje, honderdje, etc.

• The rules for the Dutch diminutive forms are moderately complicated. Suffice it to say that the diminutive suffix surfaces as one of (only) five forms: -je, -pje, -tje, -kje and -etje.

• According to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ie#Afrikaans, Afrikaans similarly has: -jie, -pie, -tjie, -kie and -etjie. Under the assumption that this is the full list of forms, “-ie” and “-djie” are not diminutive forms.

Who can confirm the Afrikaans diminutive forms?Redav (talk) 12:16, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

Diaeresis on ü and ö

In the table of letters, it says for ü that the diaeresis means a new syllable, and then states the exception that in German words or German surnames it's pronounced the same as in German.

Should the table entry for ö mention the same exception? TooManyFingers (he/him · talk) 19:14, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

Request for template removal

Hi, I have a small issue with this article. There's a template stating Afrikaans is considered vulnerable by UNESCO, I don't think this belongs here.

I followed the source. The classification isn't based on any linguistic study or academic peer review, it's a label applied because South Africa's government never submitted country data to UNESCO's World Atlas of Languages. It's said Languages without government input were bulk assigned as "potentially vulnerable" as a placeholder. Anyone can submit and spam a language as being vulnerable, especially considering the people who nominated it, are the controversial group "afriforum" which is notable for its grievances on this topic. Also very few sources even mention this other than afriforum and some radio station.

For context: South Africa has around 9 million Xhosa speakers and 3 million Tsonga speakers, and neither language is considered vulnerable. Afrikaans is a medium of instruction in most Western Cape schools, it's home language or fal (first additional language) it appears on road signs, billboards, and broadcast media, and has institutional support across two countries including Namibia. That doesn't meet any reasonable definition of vulnerable.

I'm not trying to dispute UNESCO as a source generally, but this specific listing doesn't reflect an actual evaluation of the language. The verification is thin and the label adds no useful information to the article. Also the secondary sources used are not reliable by Wikipedia standards. Even if we ignore it's misinformation. This laundering, afriforum is not a reliable source, even if a reliable source quoted what they claimed it's still not reliable, WP:PUS . The 2010 book Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger does not say Afrikaans is vulnerable. We can't cite the 2022 source, the web is under maintenance, so it's a verification issue and the verification methods given are unreliable. It should be removed. Omniking2100 (talk) 21:51, 23 June 2026 (UTC)