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Intelligibility, Afrikaans & Dutch? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5122 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 25 of 36 29 November 2010 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It's funny that you should mention that because I watched that episode a while back and had some mixed feelings about it. The language spoken in the opening scene sounded like no language I had ever heard before and I didn't understand a word of it so don't worry, it's definitely not you. When they later said it was a Dutch ship I thought "Wait, so that was supposed to be Dutch? No way!" but it might be some form of Afrikaans. I'll have to re-watch it because I only saw it once.
They kind of redeemed themselves though, by casting a real Dutch women in a Dutch role. The moment she started talking I said "See, now that's a Dutch accent!". Kudos to House for not trying to pass of a German or Scandinavian accent as a Dutch one. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ncruz Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5325 days ago 31 posts - 56 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Dutch, Portuguese, Afrikaans Studies: French, German, Italian, Russian, Norwegian, Japanese, Scottish Gaelic | Message 26 of 36 29 November 2010 at 8:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
A while back I wrote about this in a similar thread:
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| lex3000 Diglot Newbie United Kingdom afrikaanslond&# Joined 5037 days ago 6 posts - 12 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans Studies: Esperanto | Message 27 of 36 30 November 2010 at 8:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm English and have been teaching myself Afrikaans for about 11 years. I did a Dutch course at around the time I started although all it really did was to leave me with a more Dutch-sounding accent. Whilst I can read Dutch to a reasonable level, I find the spelling differences actually quite difficult, for example “ij” instead of “y”, “sch” instead of “sk” look odd to me now because I’m so familiar with Afrikaans. In addition, as previous posters have pointed out, the pronunciation also has differences.
I’ve been able to chat reasonably well with Dutch people and Flemings without adapting my Afrikaans. There is of course a difference between native Afrikaans speaker and a learner speaking Afrikaans with a Dutch person or Fleming. Funnily enough, two Afrikaans friends told me about a recent trip to Gent where they spoke Afrikaans with the Flemish staff in a restaurant who asked if they were from the Netherlands. I’ve also found Afrikaans quite a useful starting point for other Germanic languages and it’s helped me with German in particular and with Swedish to a lesser degree. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| EmmiInEurope Tetraglot Newbie South Africa nederlandsvirafrikaa Joined 4902 days ago 13 posts - 26 votes Speaks: Afrikaans*, English, French, Dutch Studies: Spanish | Message 28 of 36 30 November 2010 at 12:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes, indeed, he speaks Afrikaans. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| NiceApple Newbie United Kingdom applelanguages.nl/ Joined 4895 days ago 6 posts - 8 votes | Message 29 of 36 30 November 2010 at 2:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm a native Dutch speaker myself and to us, without offending anyone, Afrikaans sounds like a simplefied, and slightly funny, version of Dutch. With some knowledge about the vocabulary (since many words do differ from Dutch) a Dutch speaker would probably be perfectly able to get along in Africa. Therefore, an African speaker should also be able to get along fine in the Netherlands in an informal situation. But for work, he would really have to brush up his Dutch and learn Dutch vocabulary and grammar.
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| CheeseInsider Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4909 days ago 193 posts - 238 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* Studies: French, German | Message 30 of 36 30 November 2010 at 9:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks for that map! Do you think you'd be able to post a link to the thread you were talking about? :) Thanks for your reply!
That's an interesting anecdote :) Somebody speaking Afrikaans being mistaken as someone from the Netherlands. I guess the grammatical differences must not be too noticeable in speech then? Edited by CheeseInsider on 30 November 2010 at 9:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| t123 Diglot Senior Member South Africa https://github.com/t Joined 5398 days ago 139 posts - 226 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans | Message 31 of 36 30 November 2010 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It's not a Western Cape accent, it's actually the Cape Coloured accent they're talking
about, who mainly live in the Western Cape. I remember reading an article a while back where they were looking for people to work at a call centre for Dutch companies. They preferred coloured people since their pronunciation is closer to Dutch. I think they said it took about 3 months of training before they started, unfortunately I can't find the article. I can't find a decent example of the accent, but here's a small video example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J98eswimr4 at around 0:30 you can hear the guy say jy with a J sound (like jay), in standard Afrikaans it's a Y (like yay). Most of the other videos I found were full of slang and/or potentially not appropriate ;) Otherwise I see someone has upload an entire old Afrikaans series from around 1990 I think, called Orkney Snork Nie: http://www.youtube.com/results? search_query=orkney+snork+nie&page=&utm_source=opensearch (Orkney is a small town in SA). There's also another series called Vetkoek Paleis on YouTube. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6490 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 32 of 36 01 December 2010 at 12:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Even though I normally don't watch sitcoms I had to take a look at this Snork thing. It took me several minutes to get accostumed to it (those people definitely had the diphtongs I mentioned above), and only around halfway through a 8 minutes episode could I in general terms follow what the actors said. This isn't surprising - the podcasts from Radio sonder Grense have voices that each speak for several minutes in a level tone without interruptions (and without music) - of course that is easier to understand.
NCruz's map is very interesting. As far as I can see the only area that is substantially further away from Standard Dutch is the area around Limburg. Well, actually I have always had the impression that the dominating language there is Wallonian French so those few who speak a remote Dutch dialect there must feel somewhat ostracized. the Ethnologue has as expected classified Limburgisch as a language: "Classification: Indo-European, Germanic, West, High German, German, Middle German, West Middle German, Rhenisch Franconian" . It is interesting that according to this classification Limburgisch is closer to Letzeburgisch and the neighbouring German dialects than to Standard Dutch. The other Dutch dialects lie closer to the standard form than Afrikaans does, so the map doesn't really support a claim that Afrikaans just should be one Dutch dialect among others. Edited by Iversen on 14 December 2010 at 9:37am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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