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Intelligibility, Afrikaans & Dutch? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| CheeseInsider Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5123 days ago 193 posts - 238 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin* Studies: French, German | Message 1 of 36 22 November 2010 at 12:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello all! I just watched some videos, and read the wikipedia page on Afrikaans. In all the sources, it was stated that Afrikaans and Dutch are to a great degree mutually intelligible. And furthermore, at one time Afrikaans was considered a dialect of Dutch. I have some questions for anyone who has knowledge of Dutch or Afrikaans, both would be excellent. To what extent are the two mutually intelligible? Is one easier for the other party to understand? Let's say I spoke Afrikaans, and I decided I was going to move to Holland, and never speak any English. If I used Afrikaans without any modifications to the way I spoke or wrote, would I be understood at least 80% of the time? Would I understand the Dutch speakers? How about if I changed my accent, to mimic Dutch, and wrote using Dutch spellings? I know that there are differences in grammar, to what extent they impede on mutual understanding I do not know. Anyone care to share their thoughts?
:) Please and thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5848 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 36 22 November 2010 at 1:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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I speak Dutch fluently, but I have never learned Afrikaans. Before my brother moved to South Africa, he showed me the immigration forms to the country written in Afrikaans. I could understand about all of it with my knowledge of Dutch. I have also heard Afrikaans spoken on Dutch TV and I could understand most of it. Mick33 here in this forum writes a lot in Afrikaans and I reply in Dutch to this - we both understand each other without a problem.
Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 22 November 2010 at 4:34pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| CheeseInsider Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5123 days ago 193 posts - 238 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* Studies: French, German | Message 3 of 36 22 November 2010 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for your answer! This is the kind of reply I was hoping to get, so for this I am grateful ^_^
Do you think that if someone were to learn Afrikaans, but spoke it with a Dutch accent, and with Dutch spelling rules, would it be almost unnoticeable to Dutch people that he was in fact speaking Afrikaans? Or would the sentence structures give it away? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 36 22 November 2010 at 2:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is not just a question of pronunciation, and I suppose that it would be obvious to Dutch and Flemish speakers that you actually spoke 'tweaked' Afrikaans. But does it really matter? It is fairly certain that they would understand much of what you said. For instance your first "ik is" would be a certain give away. But an Afrikaaner could make it even easier for the speakers of D/F to understand him/her just by avoiding certain expressions in Afrikaans, such as the double negation "nie", taking care to observe the (very) limited verbal inflection in D/F and cutting down on the diphtongs in certain variants of Afrikaans (eg. "microfoon" /mikrofooorn/).
When I began to read and study Afrikaans I only had my fairly basic Dutch as a basis, and yet I could read it fairly well within something like a month, and I also began writing simple messages in the language around the same time. I can see from another thread that I also listened to a few podcast/youtube videos in January this year, but then I heard absolutely nothing in that language before November. In spite of this, when I found a reliable a fairly plentiful source* for podcasts (podgoois) in Afrikaans at Radio sonder Grense around a month ago I could more or less understand the whole thing, and I can already now do my work while listening without loosing too much of the content. This just goes to show how close the two languages really are. Edited by Iversen on 22 November 2010 at 2:42pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| CheeseInsider Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5123 days ago 193 posts - 238 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* Studies: French, German | Message 5 of 36 22 November 2010 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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That is excellent to hear! Thanks for the thorough reply. Do you think Afrikaans is relatively easy to learn in comparison to Dutch?
And I'm curious to know how the double negation in Afrikaans came to be, I'll have to google that :P 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5336 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 7 of 36 22 November 2010 at 4:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Written Afrikaans poses little to no challenges at all for me and I can read it almost effortlessly, understanding at least 90%. Spoken Afrikaans, however, is a different story. In this interview with Charlize Theron I can understand almost everything she says perfectly. She's speaking to a Flemish journalist through so I'm guessing she's making an effort to keep her speech as clear as possible.
Iversen, thank you for that link you posted. I've made several fruitless attempts at finding spoken Afrikaans materials before and this site looks really good. I listened to one of the podcasts for a couple of minutes and I found it quite hard to understand. The speaker speaks quite slowly but I could still only get the gist of it, rarely an entire sentence. When the person at the beginning of the podcast was speaking much faster, I only caught the occasional word. I can definitely hear that it's close to Dutch and I feel like if I focused more I could make out what it means but if I let my focus slip for a second and just start listening, the words hardly get through to me at all. I haven't had much exposure to spoken Afrikaans though, so I assume it would get more comprehensible if I listened to it more often. I read a thread a while back where a native Afrikaans speaker (can't remember their name at the moment) explained that there are different levels of colloquial speech and wrote something in apparently pretty everyday speech that I could make head nor tail of without a translation. I'm sure that if I heard it spoken I would have absolutely no idea what was going on. So from the perspective of a Dutch speaker with limited exposure to Afrikaans, I would say that the written language is pretty easy to make sense of and if it is spoken slowly and clearly you can have a conversation but speaking quickly and throwing in colloquial speech and slang makes it significantly harder or even incomprehensible. As for the difficulty level, I think Afrikaans is considered easier than Dutch since it has abandoned verb conjugations and grammatical gender. From what I've seen, sentence order seems pretty close to Dutch. Edited by ReneeMona on 22 November 2010 at 5:01pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 8 of 36 22 November 2010 at 5:26pm | IP Logged | ||
This sounds a fair bit like how I fare with Scots. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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