It is easy to assume that Afrikaans is simply "simplified Dutch" and that its vocabulary is therefore Dutch all the way down. It is not. The Afrikaans lexicon is a geological cross-section of three centuries of contact at the Cape: a Dutch core, but with distinct layers deposited by every community that fed into the language — the indigenous Khoikhoi, enslaved people from Asia and East Africa, French Huguenot refugees, neighbouring Bantu-speaking peoples, and the British colonial presence. Some of these borrowings are so frequent and so thoroughly naturalised that no one thinks of them as foreign. The most striking single fact on this page: baie, the everyday word for "very" and "many" — one of the most common words in the entire language — is not Dutch. It comes from Malay. Once you see that, you see Afrikaans differently.
The Dutch core
The foundation is unambiguous: the great majority of Afrikaans words descend from the seventeenth-century Dutch brought by the Dutch East India Company from 1652. Function words, basic verbs, kinship terms, numbers, the core of everyday life — these are overwhelmingly Dutch, usually reshaped by Afrikaans's characteristic sound changes and loss of endings.
My ouma het altyd gesê 'n mens moet hard werk.
My grandmother always said one must work hard. (every content word here is Dutch-derived)
Ons gaan môre met die hele gesin see toe.
We're going to the sea with the whole family tomorrow.
This core is why Dutch speakers can read Afrikaans on sight. But it is only the base layer, and the more interesting story is what was deposited on top of it.
The Khoekhoe layer: the indigenous Cape
The Khoikhoi (Khoekhoe-speaking) people were at the Cape long before any ship arrived, and their languages left a permanent mark — especially on the names of indigenous plants, animals, and places, the things for which Dutch simply had no word. Many South African toponyms are Khoekhoe in origin, and a handful of these borrowings are now utterly ordinary Afrikaans.
| Word | Source | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| gogga | Khoekhoe | insect, bug, creepy-crawly |
| kwagga | Khoekhoe | quagga (the extinct zebra); imitative of its call |
| dagga | Khoekhoe | cannabis |
| karos | Khoekhoe | animal-skin blanket / cloak |
Daar's 'n gogga in die bad — kan jy dit uitkry?
There's a bug in the bath — can you get it out?
Die kwagga is in die 1880's uitgewis.
The quagga was wiped out in the 1880s.
The everyday status of gogga is the tell: a child learning Afrikaans meets this Khoekhoe word among their very first animal words, with no sense that it is anything but native.
The Malay and Portuguese-creole layer: the slave era
This is the layer that most surprises learners. From the late 1600s the Cape was home to a large enslaved population brought from the Indonesian archipelago, the Indian subcontinent, and elsewhere across the Indian Ocean world. They spoke Malay and a Portuguese-based creole that served as the lingua franca of the Indian Ocean slave trade — and they contributed words that are now central, high-frequency Afrikaans.
The headline word is baie (very / many), from Malay banyak. There is nothing peripheral about it — it is among the commonest words you will ever use, and it is not Dutch.
Baie dankie vir die hulp — dit beteken baie vir my.
Thank you very much for the help — it means a lot to me. (baie twice, both from Malay banyak)
Food and household words cluster heavily in this layer, a quiet testament to who was cooking in Cape kitchens:
| Word | Source | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| baie | Malay banyak | very / many |
| piesang | Malay pisang | banana |
| baadjie | Malay baju | jacket |
| blatjang | Malay belacan | chutney |
| tronk | Portuguese tronco | jail, prison |
| sambreel | Portuguese sombreiro | umbrella |
Sit nog 'n bietjie blatjang by die kerrie.
Add a bit more chutney to the curry.
Hy't drie jaar in die tronk gesit.
He spent three years in jail. (tronk, from Portuguese tronco)
Vat jou sambreel saam — dit lyk na reën.
Take your umbrella along — it looks like rain. (sambreel, from Portuguese sombreiro)
The French Huguenot layer
When French Protestant refugees (Huguenots) arrived at the Cape from 1688, they were deliberately dispersed among the Dutch settlers and shifted to Dutch within a generation or two. They left fewer everyday words than the Malay layer, but a real imprint survives, much of it in surnames (du Toit, le Roux, Marais, Joubert) and in some vocabulary of the table and the field.
Die familie Du Toit boer al geslagte lank in die Franschhoek-vallei.
The Du Toit family has farmed in the Franschhoek valley for generations. (Franschhoek = 'French corner')
The place name Franschhoek ("French corner") is itself a monument to this layer, and many wine-farm names in the Western Cape carry French echoes.
The Bantu layer
Contact with neighbouring Bantu-speaking peoples — speakers of Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana and others — contributed a further, smaller set of borrowings, often for local phenomena, and the traffic ran both ways (those languages borrowed heavily from Afrikaans in return). Words like piet-my-vrou (the red-chested cuckoo, onomatopoeic and partly Bantu-influenced in regional naming traditions) and a range of regional and informal terms belong here, alongside many toponyms across the eastern and northern parts of the country.
In die lente hoor jy oral die piet-my-vrou roep.
In spring you hear the red-chested cuckoo calling everywhere.
The modern English layer
The most active layer today is English, deposited from British rule in the nineteenth century onward and pouring in continuously now through technology, media, and daily bilingual life. Unlike the older layers, this one is visible and ongoing — you can watch it happen. English borrowings are nativised with Afrikaans morphology the moment they arrive: they take the ge- past prefix, native plurals, and diminutives.
Ek het die dokument gisteraand ge-e-mail.
I emailed the document last night. (English root, Afrikaans ge- past)
Sy het al die settings op haar foon verander.
She changed all the settings on her phone.
The contrast with the older layers is instructive: baie and tronk have been Afrikaans for three hundred years and feel utterly native, while ge-e-mail still wears its English origin on its sleeve — but the mechanism is identical. Afrikaans has always grown by absorbing and naturalising the words of everyone it lived alongside.
Common mistakes
These are errors of assumption — taking the whole vocabulary to be Dutch, or mis-spelling the older loans by reaching for a foreign-looking form.
❌ [assuming] 'baie must be from Dutch, like the rest.'
Incorrect — baie is from Malay banyak, not Dutch; Dutch uses heel/erg/veel.
✅ [understanding] 'baie is a Malay-derived word that is now core Afrikaans vocabulary.'
Correct.
❌ Hy't in die tronco gesit.
Incorrect — the word was nativised long ago; the Afrikaans spelling is tronk, not the Portuguese tronco.
✅ Hy't in die tronk gesit.
He was in jail.
❌ Daar's 'n goga in die kombuis.
Incorrect spelling — the Khoekhoe loan is written gogga (double g).
✅ Daar's 'n gogga in die kombuis.
There's a bug in the kitchen.
❌ Vat jou sombreel saam.
Incorrect — the nativised Afrikaans spelling is sambreel, not the Portuguese-looking sombreel/sombreiro.
✅ Vat jou sambreel saam.
Take your umbrella along.
Key takeaways
- Afrikaans vocabulary is a layered structure: a Dutch core overlaid by Khoekhoe, Malay/Portuguese-creole, French, Bantu, and English borrowings.
- High-frequency everyday words are not all Dutch — baie ("very/many") is Malay (banyak), and gogga ("insect") is Khoekhoe.
- The slave-era layer (Malay and Portuguese-creole: baie, piesang, baadjie, blatjang, tronk, sambreel) is the most surprising and reveals Afrikaans's multi-ethnic formation.
- Loanwords were nativised in spelling and morphology: write tronk (not tronco), gogga (double g), sambreel (not sombreiro).
- The English layer is ongoing and visible, nativised by the same machinery (ge-e-mail) that absorbed the older loans centuries ago — see contact influences for the grammatical side of the story.
Now practice Afrikaans
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Start learning Afrikaans→Related Topics
- Contact Influences: Khoekhoe, Malay, PortugueseC1 — The non-Dutch layers in Afrikaans — Khoekhoe, Malay, Portuguese, Bantu and English — and the case that the language's most distinctive features came from contact, not from Dutch alone.
- Spelling Loanwords and InternationalismsB1 — How Afrikaans adapts borrowed spellings — nativising some words fully, keeping foreign letters in others, and always attaching native endings on top.
- Afrikaans and Dutch: A Grammatical ComparisonB2 — Afrikaans is the most analytic Germanic language — a daughter of 17th-century Dutch that kept Dutch syntax but shed almost all of its inflection.
- Regional and Social Variation: OverviewB1 — Standard Afrikaans is one variety among several — Kaaps, Oranjerivierafrikaans and Oosgrensafrikaans are real, vibrant systems with their own grammar, and the textbook standard is not the only 'correct' Afrikaans.
- Kaaps (Cape Afrikaans)B2 — Kaaps — the vibrant Cape vernacular spoken by Coloured communities of greater Cape Town — with its systematic grammar: the vir-marked object, distinctive negation, heavy code-switching, and Malay- and Khoekhoe-derived vocabulary. Presented as a legitimate variety, not 'broken' Afrikaans.