Prepositions: Afrikaans vs Dutch and English

Dutch speakers approaching Afrikaans, and English speakers who have picked up some Dutch, both fall into the same trap: they assume the prepositions map across one-to-one. Most of the time they nearly do, which is exactly what makes the exceptions dangerous. Afrikaans is descended from seventeenth-century Dutch, so the bulk of the inventory is shared, and the full Afrikaans set is laid out on its own page (prepositions overview). This page is about the divergences — the handful of places where transferring a Dutch or English preposition wholesale produces a sentence that is wrong, marked, or means something else. Two features stand out above the rest: the directional postposition toe, which has no equivalent sitting in that slot in Dutch or English, and the personal-object marker vir, which English and Dutch lack entirely.

toe: a postposition with no counterpart

Afrikaans has a directional construction in which toe follows its noun rather than preceding it — a true postposition, "to / towards." You say the destination first and toe second.

There is nothing positioned like this in standard Dutch, which uses the preposition naar before the noun (naar het strand), nor in English, which uses to before the noun. The Afrikaans toe sits after the destination, and this is one of the most recognisably Afrikaans constructions in the language. Afrikaans also has na (before the noun) and frequently combines the two as a circumposition — na die dorp toe — but the bare postpositional toe is the feature Dutch speakers must consciously add, because their grammar offers them nothing to transfer. The directional system is detailed on direction: na, toe, and the Dutch grammatical comparison covers the wider divergence.

vir: marking the personal object

The single biggest structural surprise for Dutch and English speakers is vir in front of a personal direct or indirect object. Where Dutch uses a bare dative-like object and English uses bare word order or to, Afrikaans very commonly inserts vir before a human object — even a direct one. This is not the vir meaning "for"; it is a grammaticalised personal-object marker, treated fully on vir as the indirect-object marker.

A Dutch speaker would render the first as Ik heb Jan gezien with no preposition at all, and adding one feels wrong to them — yet in Afrikaans Ek het vir Jan gesien is entirely natural and arguably the default in speech. An English speaker is even more startled, because for in front of a direct object ("I saw for Jan") is ungrammatical in English. The mental adjustment is to stop reading vir as "for" and start reading it as a flag that a person is the object.

by: the classic false friend

by looks identical to Dutch bij and English by, and that resemblance hides a genuine shift in meaning. Afrikaans by primarily means at / with / in the presence of a location or person — it is the everyday word for "at someone's place" or "at an event." It does not normally carry the English "by" senses of agency ("written by"), means ("by car"), or "next to / past."

The trap is that by feels safe to both Dutch and English speakers, so they reach for it to translate every "by." For agency you need deur, for means met, for "next to" langs. Dutch bij overlaps with Afrikaans by more than English does, but even Dutch speakers over-extend it.

Verb-preposition pairings drift apart

Even where both languages have the same two prepositions, they often pair them with verbs differently. The classic case is "to wait for." Dutch fixes on wachten op. Afrikaans accepts wag vir as the everyday form and wag op in more formal or literary registers — and a Dutch speaker who says only wag op in casual speech sounds stiff and slightly foreign.

Note that dink aan genuinely matches Dutch denken aan, so not every pairing diverges — the danger is precisely that most match, which lulls the Dutch speaker into transferring the few that do not. Treat each high-frequency verb-plus-preposition as a unit to be checked rather than derived.

A three-way map: to, at, for

The clearest way to hold the divergences in mind is a single table comparing the three high-traffic prepositions across all three languages.

The two cells with no English or Dutch entry — the postpositional toe and the personal-object vir — are exactly the features that most set Afrikaans apart. If you internalise those two, the rest of the system is a matter of checking individual pairings.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• Most Afrikaans prepositions match Dutch, which is why the exceptions are dangerous — wholesale transfer is the Dutch speaker's main error.
• The postposition toe ("X toe") has no Dutch or English equivalent in that slot; it is the most distinctively Afrikaans directional (direction: na, toe).
• vir marks a personal object — even a direct one — where Dutch and English use none; read it as an object flag, not "for" (vir-dative).
• by is a false friend: it means "at / in the presence of," not English agency (use deur), means (use met), or "next to" (use langs).
• Verb-preposition pairings drift: everyday wag vir vs formal wag op, soek often bare — check each pair instead of importing the Dutch one (see Afrikaans and Dutch compared).