Ok, if I could get اردو, മലയാളം, Qhichwa Simi, فارسی, isiZulu, ಕನ್ನಡ, नेपाली, Lëtzebuergisch, कोंकणी, Setswana, বাংলা, తెలుగు, and ਪੰਜਾਬੀ to all move over a little bit.

Because the Afrikaans Language Interface Pack is now available!

Some info about Afrikaans:

Number of speakers: 4 million

Name in the language itself: Afrikaans

Afrikaans is one of the 11 official languages of South Africa and is spoken mainly in the western one-third of the country, especially the Northern Cape and Western Cape provinces. After Zulu and Xhosa, Afrikaans has the third-largest language community in South Africa. It is also spoken in the neighboring country of Namibia.

The language is a heritage of the Dutch colonization of areas of today’s South Africa from the 17th century onwards – which is why it was originally known as “Kaaps-Hollands” (“Cape Dutch”). It gained loanwords from languages of others settlers (mainly English, French and German) and the surrounding African people and underwent grammatical simplification and some phonetic changes. Afrikaans became a literary language about a century ago after it had been a spoken language only, and it replaced Standard Dutch (which had been the written language until then) officially in 1925.

Fun facts:

  • Afrikaans is the only language that has its own monument: The Afrikaans Language Monument (Afrikaanse Taalmonument) is located near Paarl in the the Western Cape Province and was completed 1975.
  • A famous English loan word from Afrikaans is trek (as in Star Trek). It means long, hard journey.
  • Afrikaans has a double negative like the French ne ... pas which is used with composite verb forms: Hy het niks gedoen nie is literally He has nothing done not.

Classification:

Afrikaans is principally derived from the same 16th-century Dutch dialect that led to modern Dutch and is closely related to that language. Both belong to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Afrikaans is the youngest Germanic language.

Script:

Latin script, 26 letters (like in English), with c, q, x, and z rarely being used. There are special characters: è, é, ê, ë, î, ï, ô, û

Enjoy!

 

This post brought to you by A (U+0041, a.k.a. LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A)