Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.pdf

Dictionary of language and linguistics 28AfrikaansLanguage of the Boers in South Africa which derived from Dutch dialects of theseventeenth century and has been used as a written language since 1875. Afrikaans is theonly creole that has been elevated to an official language (1926– along with English, inthe Republic of South Africa and in Namibia); approx. 5 million speakers. Thevocabulary and orthography of Afrikaans were determined by colloquial Dutch at thetime of South Africa’s colonization. Structurally, Afrikaans demonstrates even moremorphological simplicity than Dutch (e.g. loss of endings in conjugation and declension,cf. Afrk. sy loop vs Du. zij lopen ‘they run’).ReferencesBreyne, M.R. 1936. Afrikaans: eine Einführung in die Laut-, Formen- und Satzlehre mit Literaturproben.Leipzig.Donaldson, B.C. 1993. A grammar of Afrikaans. New York.Kloeke, G.G. 1950. Herkomst en groei van het Afrikaans. Leiden.Le Roux, J.J. 1923. Oor die afrikaanse sintaksis. Amsterdam.Raidt, R. 1983. Einführung in Geschichte und Struktur des Afrikaans. Darmstadt.Van Schoor, J.L. 1983. Die grammatika van standard-Afrikaans. Cape Town.Afro-Asiatic (also Hamito-Semitic,Erythraic)Language branch consisting of approx. 250 languages with about 175 million speakers inNorth Africa and southwest Asia which can be grouped into five or possibly six languagefamilies (Egyptian, Berber, Cushitic, Semitic, Chadic, and possibly Omotic). The firstwritten attestations (Egyptian, Akkadian) date from the early third millennium BC.Historically most of the research done on this group has focused on the reconstructionof Semitic. In the nineteenth century scholars realized that the languages of northernAfrica were related to Semitic; these languages were called ‘Hamitic’ (after Ham, the sonof Noah) and were contrasted with Semitic (Lepsius 1855). Later the term ‘Hamitic’ wasused for all inflectional languages with masculine/feminine gender in northern Africa,which were considered to be languages of more culturally advanced peoples (Meinhof1912). Today the current opinion is that the Semitic languages contrast with severallanguage families instead of with a unified Hamitic group and that languages such asFula, Massai, and Nama belong to other language groups.Characteristics: gender system (masculine/ feminine, with feminine marker t), verbalpersonal prefixes and free personal pronouns, separate conjugation for stative verbs,simple case system (nominative, accusative, objective, genitive) with indications of an