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Indo-European, Germanic, West, Low Saxon-Low Franconian, Low Franconian. (Ethnologue)
"Afrikaans is a descendent of Dutch.... Afrikaans retains some features of 18th century Dutch, together with vocabulary from various Bantu and Khoisan languages and also from Portugese and Malay. Speakers of Afrikaans can understand Dutch, though Dutch speakers tend to need a while to tune into Afrikaans." (Omniglot)
South Africa, Namibia, Botswana. Lesser numbers in other countries in southern Africa.
According to Ethnologue:
Cape Afrikaans (West Cape Afrikaans), Orange River Afrikaans, East Cape Afrikaans. (Ethnologue)
Holliday (1993) discusses the history and separation of Afrikaans from Dutch.
One of 11 official languages in South Africa and its third most widely spoken language.
"In 1925 Afrikaans was recognised by the government as a real language, instead of a slang version of Dutch." (Omniglot)
Uses a Latin orthography. Same alphabet as Dutch and English. The Unicode character for " 'n " (ʼn - Unicode point 0149) is sometimes encountered.
"From about 1815 Afrikaans started to replace Malay as the language of instruction in Muslim schools in South Africa. At that time it was written with the Arabic alphabet." (Omniglot)
See:
See also: AfrikaansLocalisation
Standard Latin fonts include the necessary characters. The character ʼn is sometimes encountered and many fonts don't render it well. It should probably be avoided.
The US (International) keyboard layout is sufficient. Translate.org.za designed the South African keyboard that allows typing in Afrikaans and other South Africa language with a single keyboard layout.
The South African language site "Batho Portal" http://www.sediba.org.za/ has a section on & in Afrikaans.
Wikipedia in Afrikaans http://af.wikipedia.org/
UNIVERSELE VERKLARING VAN MENSEREGTE (Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Afrikaans): http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/afk.htm
Numerous other sites.
The OpenOffice suite of software applications, Firefox, and Thunderbird has been localized in Afrikaans by Translate.org.za. See http://translate.org.za/content/view/17/54/ There is also an Afrikaans spell checker for all of these programs.
Other translated packages:
There is a group working on localising Drupal. See http://drupal.co.za/
Microsoft has localised some of its products in Afrikaans in LIP packages:
The web browser Opera is also available in Afrikaans.
CTexT has developed a spellchecker and hyphenator for use with Microsoft Windows. See: http://www.spel.co.za/
Locale data has been filed for af-ZA (Afrikaans in South Africa)
Google has a version localized in Afrikaans: http://www.google.com/intl/af/
Certain cell phones are available in Afrikaans, with some featuring predictive text input for Afrikaans.
A site for learning Afrikaans is at: http://www.afrikaans.us/
AfricanLanguages.com page on Afrikaans: http://www.africanlanguages.com/afrikaans/
Open-Tran.eu supports Afrikaans: http://af.open-tran.eu/
Mailing list for the discussion of Afrikaans localisation: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/translate-discuss-af
Localisation in Afrikaans seems to be well advanced in many areas. We are aware of no particular technical or linguistic problems encountered in localising this language.
Holliday, Lloyd. 1993. "The First Language Congress for Afrikaans." In Joshua Fishman, ed., The Earliest Stage of Language Planning: The "First Congress" Phenomenon. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. 11-30.
Omniglot, "Afrikaans," http://www.omniglot.com/writing/afrikaans.htm
SIL International, Ethnologue: Languages of the World, "Afrikaans," http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=afr
SIL International, "ISO 639 Code Tables," http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/codes.asp
U.S. Library of Congress, "ISO 639.2: Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages: Alpha-3 codes arranged alphabetically by the English name of language," http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/English_list.php
Wikipedia, "Afrikaans," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaans
Wolff, Friedel. 2006. "Software Localisation by Translate.org.za." Localisation Focus 5(3): 19-21.
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