Once you know the basic cleft — Dit is Jan wat dit gedoen het — the interesting question is how far the construction stretches. The answer is: much further than English's. Afrikaans does not only cleft who and what; it clefts when and where with their own dedicated connectors, building a tidy paradigm where each cleft type foregrounds a different kind of constituent and binds its clause with a different little word. English collapses all of this onto a single bleached that (it was yesterday that..., it is here that...); Afrikaans keeps the joints visible, using wat for participants, dat for time, and waar for place. Laying out that full paradigm is what this page is for.
The introductory mechanics — what a cleft is, the pseudo-cleft, when to cleft at all — live on cleft and pseudo-cleft sentences. Here we go deeper into the three cleft types and the one structural fact that ties them together: the second clause is subordinate, so its verb goes to the end.
The participant cleft: Dit is X wat...
The workhorse cleft spotlights a participant — a subject or an object — and binds the remainder with wat. The focused noun phrase sits right after dit is/was; everything else follows in a wat-clause whose verb is pushed to the very end, exactly as in any relative clause.
Dit is Jan wat gebel het.
It's Jan who called.
Watch the verb. The neutral sentence is Jan het gebel. Inside the cleft, the auxiliary het is shoved past gebel to the clause's end: ...wat gebel het. That re-ordering is obligatory and it is the single thing English speakers most reliably forget, because English leaves the verb where it was (who called).
Dit is die rooi een wat ek wil hê.
It's the red one that I want.
Dit was sy ma wat alles georganiseer het.
It was his mother who organised everything.
The participant cleft answers an implicit "which one / who exactly?" and rules out the alternatives. Dit is Jan wat gebel het does not merely report that Jan called — it insists it was Jan, not Piet, not Sannie. This exclusive, contrastive force is the heart of every cleft.
The temporal cleft: Dit was toe dat...
When the spotlight falls on a time, the connector changes to dat. You are no longer clefting a participant but a moment, so the relative-pronoun wat gives way to the complementiser dat. The clause is still verb-final.
Dit was gister dat sy gekom het.
It was yesterday that she came.
Dit was toe dat ek besef het hoe ernstig dit is.
It was then that I realised how serious it was.
The pattern Dit was toe dat... ("It was then that...") is the canonical temporal cleft and worth memorising as a unit. English uses the same frame ("it was then that"), so the structure transfers — but you must remember the connector is dat, not wat, and the verb still travels to the end (...dat sy gekom het, never ...dat sy het gekom).
Dit was in 1994 dat alles verander het.
It was in 1994 that everything changed.
Dit was eers later dat ons die waarheid uitgevind het.
It was only later that we found out the truth.
That eers later example shows the temporal cleft doing real work: it isolates the lateness of the discovery as the point, ruling out the assumption that the truth was known all along. The cleft frame lets a humble adverbial carry the full weight of the focus.
The locative cleft: Dit is hier waar...
For place, Afrikaans reaches for yet a third connector: waar ("where"). This is the cleft type with no clean English parallel — English would say "it is here that I live", flattening the locative onto that, but Afrikaans keeps the locative relative waar.
Dit is hier waar ek woon.
It is here that I live.
Dit was daar waar ons mekaar die eerste keer ontmoet het.
It was there that we first met each other.
Dit is in Kaapstad waar die meeste van die werk gebeur.
It's in Cape Town that most of the work happens.
The locative cleft answers "where exactly?" and excludes other places. Note again the verb-final clause: ...waar ek woon, ...waar ons mekaar ontmoet het. The connector waar behaves like a relative adverb, opening a subordinate clause that pushes its verb to the end just as wat and dat do.
The whole paradigm at a glance
| Cleft type | Focus | Connector | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Participant | who / what (subject, object) | wat | Dit is Jan wat gebel het. |
| Temporal | when | dat | Dit was gister dat sy gekom het. |
| Locative | where | waar | Dit is hier waar ek woon. |
Three points hold across the entire paradigm. First, the copula is always dit is (present) or dit was (past), agreeing with the dummy dit and therefore staying singular even before a plural focus (Dit is die kinders wat...). For more on this empty, grammatically-required subject, see the pronoun dit. Second, the focused element sits immediately after the copula, in the spotlight. Third — and this is the load-bearing fact — the second clause is subordinate, so its finite verb sits at the end.
The verb-final clause is the whole game
Every cleft type collapses if you keep English word order in the second clause. English says it is Jan who called, with called right after who. Afrikaans sends the verb to the back. Internalise this once and all three cleft types fall into place; miss it and every cleft you build will sound like English wearing Afrikaans words.
Dit is die boek wat ek gisteraand klaar gelees het.
It's the book that I finished reading last night.
Notice how much material can pile up between the connector and the clause-final verb: ...wat ek gisteraand klaar gelees het. The object, the time adverbial, the particle — all of them sit ahead of the verb cluster gelees het, which anchors the very end. The longer the clause, the more obvious the contrast with English becomes, and the more tempting it is to slip back into ...wat ek het gelees.
Dit was juis toe dat die telefoon gelui het.
It was just then that the phone rang.
Cleft versus simple fronting
A cleft is not your only emphasis tool, and it is the heavier one. For a lighter foregrounding you can simply front the constituent and let the verb invert to stay second. Compare:
Gister het sy gekom.
Yesterday she came. (fronted — lighter, no contrast forced)
Dit was gister dat sy gekom het.
It was yesterday that she came. (cleft — heavier, contrastive, rules out other days)
Both foreground gister, but the cleft is exclusive: it actively denies the alternatives ("yesterday, not today"). Fronting just topicalises. Reach for the cleft when you are correcting a wrong assumption or isolating one option against a set; reach for fronting when you only need quick emphasis. The strength scale runs plain stress → fronting → cleft, and clefting is the strongest, most deliberate, most written-feeling rung. See emphasis for the broader inventory.
Common mistakes
❌ Dit is Jan wat het gebel.
Incorrect — the verb het must move to the end of the wat-clause: Dit is Jan wat gebel het.
✅ Dit is Jan wat gebel het.
It's Jan who called.
❌ Dit was gister wat sy gekom het.
Incorrect — a time focus takes dat, not wat: Dit was gister dat sy gekom het.
✅ Dit was gister dat sy gekom het.
It was yesterday that she came.
❌ Dit is hier dat ek woon.
Incorrect — a place focus takes the locative waar, not dat: Dit is hier waar ek woon.
✅ Dit is hier waar ek woon.
It is here that I live.
❌ Dit was toe dat die telefoon het gelui.
Incorrect — verb-final again: the auxiliary het sits after the participle, ...dat die telefoon gelui het.
✅ Dit was toe dat die telefoon gelui het.
It was then that the phone rang.
❌ Dit is die kinders wie die venster gebreek het.
Incorrect — for a plain person-subject in ordinary use, wat is the natural connector, not wie: Dit is die kinders wat...
✅ Dit is die kinders wat die venster gebreek het.
It's the children who broke the window.
Key takeaways
- Afrikaans has a three-way cleft paradigm: wat for participants, dat for time, waar for place — where English collapses all three onto that.
- Every cleft is dit is/was
- focus + connector + a verb-final subordinate clause; the clause-final verb is the number-one English-speaker error.
- The copula agrees with the dummy dit, so it stays singular is/was even before a plural focus; see the pronoun dit.
- Each cleft type answers a different implicit question and rules out alternatives — who/what, when, or where exactly.
- The cleft is the heaviest, most contrastive emphasis device; for lighter foregrounding use simple fronting instead.
- Memorise the canonical frames Dit is X wat..., Dit was toe dat..., and Dit is hier waar... as templates and slot your material in.
Now practice Afrikaans
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Start learning Afrikaans→Related Topics
- Cleft and Pseudo-Cleft SentencesC1 — How Afrikaans uses Dit is X wat... clefts and Wat... is... pseudo-clefts to spotlight one part of a sentence, and how these compete with plain fronting.
- Topicalisation and Focus FrontingB2 — Afrikaans fronts almost any constituent to the first slot for topic or contrast — forcing V2 inversion — and uses the dit is ... wat cleft to spotlight a focus, where English leans on stress alone.
- Relative Clause Word OrderB1 — Relative clauses with wat and the waar-compounds are just verb-final subordinate clauses — the verb goes to the end, the relativiser sits right after its antecedent, and prepositional relatives use waarmee, waaroor, waarop at the clause edge.
- The Pronoun dit: it, this, thatA2 — Afrikaans dit is the all-purpose 'it' — subject and object of things, a dummy subject in weather and time phrases, a pointer back to whole ideas, and the source of the contraction dis.
- Emphasis and InsistenceB2 — How Afrikaans builds emphasis structurally — by fronting a constituent, by adding particles like tog and mos, by intensifier prefixes, and by repetition — rather than by stress alone.