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Language code: af

Technical information about ISO 639 language code af

Documentation

The table below provides technical details for the Afrikaans language, designated by the af code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

af

Name

Official

Afrikaans

Native

Afrikaans

Family
West Germanic
Scripts
Latin
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Language varieties
Cape AfrikaansOrange River AfrikaansEastern Cape Afrikaans
Related languages
DutchWest FlemishZeelandicLow GermanWest Frisian
Key facts
Developed from 17th-century Dutch spoken at the Cape ColonyVocabulary shows influence from Malay, Khoisan, Portuguese and Bantu languagesStandardised in the early 20th century, making it one of the youngest Germanic languagesGrammar is highly analytic, with no grammatical gender or case inflectionRemains largely mutually intelligible with Dutch.
Sample phrase

Hallo, hoe gaan dit?

Character encodings

UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Afrikaans belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, specifically to the Germanic and West Germanic subgroup. It is officially used in South Africa and is recognized as a minority language in Namibia. It is written in the Latin script. It is estimated that there are more than 7 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

South Africa

6.6M

Namibia

285K

*The graph shows a rough estimate of Afrikaans speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

Related locale codes

af-NA – Afrikaans (Namibia)

af-ZA – Afrikaans (South Africa)

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