Click through to our website at www.debergkant.com and you will discover our 4-star hotel accommodation descriptions and booking information translated into Afrikaans.
With a growing number of Afrikaans internet users, we felt it was important to have a website in Afrikaans to service our many local South African guests as well. We also wanted to ensure we deliver the best possible online travel booking experience for our local customers.
The Afrikaans language is one of South Africa’s 11 official languages and many bilingual South Africans use it as their first or second language. With about 7 million native speakers in South Africa, or 13.5% of the population, it is the third-most-spoken language in the country, with Afrikaans still taught in schools and certain universities.
History of a Language
The Afrikaans language came about with the arrival of French and Dutch to the Cape, followed by other nationalities arriving from Germany, Indonesia, Madagascar, as well as the local Khoi and West Africans. Deeply rooted in the Dutch language, it was only in the late 19th century Afrikaans was officially recognized as a separate language from the Dutch language.
Afrikaans embodies a character and turn of phrase all of its own with many Afrikaans words finding their way into South African English, such as bakkie (pickup truck), braai (barbecue), naartjie (tangerine), tekkies (sneakers or running shoes). A few words in standard English are derived from Afrikaans too, such as aardvark (literally earth pig), trek (pioneering journey), spoor (animal tracks), veld (Southern African grassland), boomslang (tree snake) and apartheid (segregation or apartness).
For those of you who have a little smattering of Afrikaans to travel by, you might like to take a look at these hilarious idioms clearly explained by The Intrepid Traveller.
Getting your ear around a tongue
Now that our Afrikaans website has been officially released onto the world wide web, our international guests will need to visit us in the Western Cape Province of South Africa to hear how the Afrikaans language sounds when spoken in person.
According to The South Africa news channel, Afrikaans is said to be one of the sexiest accents in the world, well according to some anyway! Many box office movies produced using South African stories have seen international film stars take the lead role and use the Afrikaans accent such as 'Invictus' starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon and Jennifer Hudson as lead actor in the role of anti-apartheid activist Winnie Mandela.
Thanks for reading and Tot Siens until next time!
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