nie een nie, nie 'n enkele

You already know how to say "no money" with geen: Daar is geen geld nie. But sometimes "none" is not strong enough. When you want to insist that there was not even one — not a single specimen, not the slightest exception — Afrikaans reaches for nie een ... nie ("not one") and, more emphatic still, nie 'n enkele ... nie ("not a single"). These are the heavy artillery of Afrikaans negation, and they let you grade your "no" with a precision English handles only with stress or extra words like "not a single one."

The negation-intensity scale

The most useful thing to carry away from this page is that Afrikaans negatives form a gradient of strength. Most reference books treat nie, geen, and nie een as interchangeable ways of saying "no." They are not. They escalate:

When you move up this scale, you are not changing the truth conditions — geen brood and nie een brood both mean there is no bread — you are changing the emphasis. Nie een foregrounds the counting: you checked, and the count came back zero. That is a rhetorical gesture English makes with heavy stress ("there wasn't one left") or with "a single."

nie een nie — "not one, not a single one"

The structure is nie een followed, as always, by the closing nie at the end of the clause. Een here is the numeral "one," and it does exactly what stressed "one" does in English: it counts down to zero and stops there.

Notice that nie een very often pairs with a partitive van ("of"): nie een van hulle, nie een van die kinders. This is the natural home of the construction — picking out "not one" from a known group. English does the same: "not one of them."

You can also use nie een on its own as a short, emphatic answer, where it stands in for a whole clause:

nie 'n enkele ... nie — the most emphatic

To push harder still, use nie 'n enkele ("not a single"). Enkele is an adjective meaning "single, sole," and it leans into the construction the full weight of "not even one solitary instance." This is the form you use when you are exasperated, indignant, or making a strong point.

Because enkele is an adjective, it sits directly in front of a noun: 'n enkele fout, 'n enkele woord, 'n enkele keer. The noun is obligatory here — you would not normally leave 'n enkele dangling on its own the way you can with bare een. If you want "not a single one" with no noun, you fall back to nie een nie.

The closing nie never disappears

This is the trap. Because nie een and nie 'n enkele already contain a nie at the front, English speakers assume the negation is finished and stop. It is not. Like every other negative in Afrikaans, these constructions still take the clause-closing nie at the very end. The opening nie is part of the nie een unit; the closing nie seals the clause, exactly as it does after geen or nooit.

In that tiny sentence you see two nie's: the first is glued to een ("not one"), the second closes the clause. They are doing different jobs, and both are obligatory.

How nie een differs from geen — register and feel

In meaning, nie een and geen overlap heavily, and learners ask which to use. Three guidelines:

First, register. Geen is slightly more formal and bookish; nie een is more conversational and emphatic. In speech, an irritated Afrikaans speaker is far more likely to say Daar was nie een nie than Daar was geen nie. In a written report you might prefer geen.

Second, countability and focus. Nie een counts discrete items and foregrounds the count, so it pairs naturally with things you can tally: nie een mens, nie een fout, nie een van hulle. Geen is comfortable with both count and mass nouns: geen geld (no money — mass), geen mense (no people — count). You would not normally say nie een geld nie for "no money," because money is not counted in ones.

Third, emphasis. If you simply want to state a fact, geen is the neutral choice. If you want the listener to feel the absence — to register that you really did expect at least one — climb the scale to nie een or nie 'n enkele. The full decision logic lives on choosing between nie and geen; here, just remember that the nie een family is the emphatic end of that same continuum.

Common Mistakes

The opening nie in nie een does not exempt you from the closing nie. Every negative clause in Afrikaans gets sealed at the end.

Geen and nie een are two separate constructions on the same scale; pick one. Geen een is not standard Afrikaans.

There is only ever one closing nie, and it goes at the very end — after van hulle, not before it.

Keep the -e: in this construction the inflected form enkele is what you want.

Key Takeaways

• Afrikaans negation runs on a strength scale: nie < geen < nie een < nie 'n enkele. Choose your form to match how emphatic you want to be.
• nie een ... nie means "not one / not a single one," counts discrete items, and pairs naturally with partitive van (nie een van hulle).
• nie 'n enkele ... nie is the most emphatic; it needs a following noun (nie 'n enkele fout).
• Both keep the clause-closing nie — the opening nie does not finish the job.
• Nie een is more conversational and emphatic than the bookish, neutral geen; never combine them as geen een.
• Keep the orthography clean: 'n always carries its apostrophe, and the adjective is enkele with its -e.