Nominalisation and Nominal Style

Nominalisation is the act of turning a verb or a whole clause into a noun: instead of saying hulle het die plan uitgevoer ("they carried out the plan"), formal Afrikaans says die uitvoering van die plan ("the execution of the plan"). This is not merely a vocabulary choice — it is a syntactic strategy that lets a writer compress a clause into a noun phrase and then slot that noun phrase wherever a noun can go. It is the single most recognisable feature of formal, academic and legal Afrikaans, and learning to wield it deliberately is what separates prose that reads as genuinely educated from prose that merely avoids mistakes. This page is about nominalisation as style; the morphology of forming individual derived nouns is on agent and derived nouns.

What nominalisation does to a clause

A clause has a verb, a subject, often an object — it asserts something happening. A noun phrase names a thing. Nominalisation collapses the first into the second: the action becomes a noun, its old subject and object become possessors or van-complements, and the tense, mood and assertion all evaporate. What you lose in liveliness you gain in packing density — a nominalised action can be made the subject or object of a further verb, letting you stack ideas that would otherwise need several sentences.

The whole event "they implemented the policy" has been packed into the subject die implementering van die beleid, freeing the main verb (het ... geneem) to say something about that event. You could not do this with a clause — a clause cannot be the subject of geneem. That is the core power of the device.

In each case a verb (implementeer, ondersoek, beplan) has become a noun (implementering, ondersoek, beplanning), and what was the object now hangs off it with van or na. The clause has become a thing you can predicate on.

The deverbal machinery: -ing, -te, and the infinitive-as-noun

Afrikaans builds these nouns by a small, learnable set of routes. The most productive by far is the suffix -ing, which attaches to a verb stem to name the action or its result: beplan → beplanning, implementeer → implementering, uitvoer → uitvoering, ondersoek → ondersoek (here a zero-derived noun identical to the verb). A second route uses -te or -heid for states and qualities, overlapping with adjective nominalisation. A third — distinctively useful — turns the bare infinitive into a noun, complete with its own die.

Notice how na bestudering van die feite replaces a whole subordinate clause — nadat die hof die feite bestudeer het — with a compact prepositional phrase. This is the workhorse pattern of formal Afrikaans: a preposition plus a nominalisation plus a van-complement, standing in for an entire clause.

The fixed nominal connectors

Formal Afrikaans has a set of prepositional phrases built entirely on nominalisation that function as connectors. They are so frozen that you should treat them as vocabulary, but it pays to see the nominalisation inside them, because that is what makes them formal.

Met die oog op (literally "with the eye on") and na aanleiding van ("following on from") are nominalised prepositional connectors — oog and aanleiding are the nominal cores. Speech would use plain vir or oor; the nominal phrase signals register. The same logic produces ten opsigte van ("with respect to"), met betrekking tot ("with regard to") and ter wille van ("for the sake of").

Source-language comparison: the instinct transfers, the words do not

English speakers have a real advantage here, because formal English is itself heavily nominal — "the implementation of the policy", "with a view to", "further to your letter" all have direct Afrikaans counterparts, and the instinct to nominalise in formal register carries straight over. What does not carry over is the specific morphology and the specific frozen phrases. English "-tion" maps unpredictably: sometimes to Afrikaans -sie (organisasie, evaluasie), sometimes to -ing (implementering, not implementasie), sometimes to a zero noun. You cannot derive the Afrikaans form by translating the English suffix; you must learn each deverbal noun. And the connector phrases are idioms — na aanleiding van is not a word-for-word rendering of any English phrase.

When nominal style helps — and when it hurts

Nominalisation is a tool, not a virtue. It earns its place when it lets you make an action the subject or object of a further predication, or when it compresses a clause that would otherwise force a clumsy subordinate structure. It hurts when it strips out a perfectly good verb for no gain, burying the agency and forcing the reader to unpack the noun back into the action it hides. The vice has a name in English style guides — nominalese — and Afrikaans officialese suffers from it just as badly.

That sentence stacks three nominalisations (voltooiing, hersiening, evaluering) and says almost nothing a verb-based version would not say more clearly: Die evaluering is hersien, maar nog nie voltooi nie ("The evaluation has been revised but not yet completed"). The test is whether the nominalisation is doing structural work — being predicated on, compressing a clause you genuinely need compressed — or merely converting a live verb into a dead noun out of habit.

Matching nominalisation to register

The skill at C1 is calibration. Conversational Afrikaans nominalises very little — it prefers verbs and full clauses — so heavy nominal style in a casual message reads as stilted or sarcastic. Formal reports, academic writing and legal text expect it, and under-nominalising there reads as naive. The mistake learners make at both ends is treating nominalisation as either always-good (academese everywhere) or always-bad (verbs everywhere); the competence is reading the register and dialling the density to fit. See formal and academic writing for the wider register toolkit and academic conventions for the essay specifically.

The first is everyday and verbal; the second is formal and nominal (die ... besluit as subject of a passive). Neither is "more correct" — each fits its setting, and choosing the wrong density for the context is the actual error.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• Nominalisation converts a verb or clause into a noun (uitvoer → die uitvoering), so an action can become the subject or object of a further verb — the engine of information packing in formal Afrikaans.
• The most productive route is the suffix -ing; other routes use -te / -heid, zero derivation (die besluit, die ondersoek), and the infinitive as noun. English suffixes do not map predictably, so each deverbal noun must be learnt.
• The signature pattern is preposition + nominalisation + van + complement: na bestudering van die feite, met die oog op uitbreiding — a noun phrase standing in for a whole clause.
• Frozen nominal connectors — na aanleiding van, met betrekking tot, ten opsigte van — are idioms to memorise, not phrases to translate word-for-word.
• Nominalise when the noun does structural work; avoid stacking nouns that merely rename live verbs. The C1 skill is calibrating density to register: heavy in formal text, light in everyday speech.