Afrikaans borrows freely from Dutch, English, Malay, Portuguese and French, but it does not leave borrowed spellings alone. Over a century the official wordlist (the Afrikaanse Woordelys en Spelreëls, the AWS) has steadily pulled loanwords toward Afrikaans sound-spelling, so that photo became foto and chocolate became sjokolade. The single most useful thing to understand is that there is no all-or-nothing rule: some words are fully nativised, some keep their foreign skin, and almost all of them — whatever their spelling — still take native Afrikaans plurals and diminutives. This page is about how the stem is spelled; for the broader story of which languages contributed which words, see loan layers.
Three fates of a loanword
When a foreign word enters Afrikaans, one of three things happens to its spelling.
1. Full nativisation. The word is respelled phonetically the Afrikaans way. The French téléphone / English telephone becomes telefoon; chocolat / chocolade becomes sjokolade; machine becomes masjien; café becomes kafee. The tell-tale signs are the digraph sj for the sh-sound, oe for oo, and doubled vowels obeying the normal vowel-doubling rule.
Sy't my op die telefoon gebel, nie op WhatsApp nie.
She called me on the telephone, not on WhatsApp.
Ek koop altyd 'n blok melksjokolade vir die kinders.
I always buy a bar of milk chocolate for the kids.
Die wasmasjien is weer stukkend — dis die derde keer vanjaar.
The washing machine is broken again — that's the third time this year.
2. Foreign letters retained. Many words keep letters that are otherwise rare in Afrikaans — c, q, x, z — and sometimes whole foreign spellings, because the AWS judges them too well-established (or too internationally recognisable) to respell. Restaurant stays restaurant; charme is written sjarme in nativised form but you will also meet the older charme. These foreign letters are a flag: when you see a c, q, x or z in an Afrikaans word, it is almost always a loan. (Their detailed behaviour has its own page: c, q, x and z.)
Ons het Saterdagaand by 'n Italiaanse restaurant geëet.
On Saturday evening we ate at an Italian restaurant.
Daar's iets aan haar — 'n sekere sjarme wat jou ontwapen.
There's something about her — a certain charm that disarms you.
3. English borrowings kept whole. Recent English borrowings are very often written exactly as in English, especially in informal writing and speech: laptop, rugby, weekend, braai aside, you will see e-pos competing with email, download alongside the calque aflaai. The standard language frequently offers an Afrikaans alternative — naweek for weekend — but the English form survives in casual use.
Ek werk die hele naweek deur, so ek's eers Maandag weer vry.
I'm working right through the weekend, so I'm only free again on Monday.
Bring jou laptop saam — ons gaan die begroting hier afhandel.
Bring your laptop along — we're going to finish the budget here.
Native endings always re-spell the stem
Here is the rule that catches learners off guard. However foreign the borrowed stem looks, the moment you add a productive Afrikaans ending — a plural, a diminutive, a verb ending — that ending behaves natively, and it can force the spelling of the whole word to adjust.
The clearest case is naweek → naweke. Adding the plural -e opens the final syllable, so by the ordinary vowel-doubling rule the ee of -week could appear to be at issue — but here the long vowel is preserved as e in the open syllable: na-we-ke. English-spelled stems do the same thing: laptop takes a native diminutive and becomes laptoppie, doubling the p to keep the o short, exactly as a native word would (kop → koppie).
| Loan stem | Native plural | Native diminutive |
|---|---|---|
| naweek (weekend) | naweke | nawekie |
| laptop | laptops | laptoppie |
| telefoon (telephone) | telefone | telefoontjie |
| restaurant | restaurante | restaurantjie |
| kafee (café) | kafees | kafeetjie |
Ek het twee naweke laas nie 'n oog toegemaak nie.
The last two weekends I didn't sleep a wink.
Hy het al drie laptoppies uitmekaar gehaal om te kyk hoe hulle werk.
He has taken apart three little laptops to see how they work.
Daar't 'n nuwe kafeetjie op die hoek oopgemaak — die koffie's heerlik.
A new little café has opened on the corner — the coffee is delicious.
A word like telefoon shows the principle from both ends: the stem itself is fully nativised (foreign ph → f, o → oo), and then the diminutive -tjie attaches as on any native noun: telefoontjie. The result is a word that is borrowed in origin but entirely Afrikaans in spelling and morphology. For the full plural picture, see plurals of loanwords; for diminutives, the diminutive overview.
The apostrophe plural: foto's
A small but important sub-rule. Loanwords ending in a single stressed vowel letter — most famously those ending in -o, -a, -i, -u — take their plural -s with an apostrophe, to stop the reader from misreading the vowel: foto → foto's, radio → radio's, taxi → taxi's, menu → menu's. The apostrophe is not optional decoration; it is a spelling instruction that keeps the vowel reading correct.
Sy het al die foto's van die troue op haar foon.
She has all the photos of the wedding on her phone.
Hier is twee menu's — een vir kos, een vir die wynlys.
Here are two menus — one for food, one for the wine list.
Where Afrikaans differs from English here
English is a famously non-respelling borrower: it keeps restaurant, café, machine, chocolate with their French or Greek skins intact, accents and all, for centuries. Afrikaans is the opposite kind of borrower — it has an official body whose explicit job is to pull spellings toward the sound. That mismatch is the heart of the difficulty for English speakers: your instinct is to leave the loanword alone, and Afrikaans's instinct is to absorb it. The two instincts collide on exactly the words that look most familiar.
In Afrikaans skryf 'n mens 'foto', nie 'photo' nie.
In Afrikaans one writes 'foto', not 'photo'.
Common mistakes
❌ Sy het 'n nuwe machine in die kombuis.
Incorrect — the AWS nativises this; it's masjien, not the English machine.
✅ Sy het 'n nuwe masjien in die kombuis.
She has a new machine in the kitchen.
❌ Ek hou van photo's van die berge.
Incorrect — the stem is nativised to foto, though the apostrophe-plural is right.
✅ Ek hou van foto's van die berge.
I like photos of the mountains.
❌ Drie laptop's lê op die tafel.
Incorrect — a consonant-final loan takes plain -s, no apostrophe.
✅ Drie laptops lê op die tafel.
Three laptops are lying on the table.
❌ Ons gaan elke weekend see toe.
Not wrong in casual speech, but the standard form is the nativised naweek.
✅ Ons gaan elke naweek see toe.
We go to the sea every weekend.
❌ Hier is twee kafées op die hoek.
Incorrect — café is fully nativised to kafee, with no accent, and the plural is kafees.
✅ Hier is twee kafees op die hoek.
There are two cafés on the corner.
Key takeaways
- Loanwords meet one of three fates: full nativisation (telefoon, sjokolade, masjien, kafee), foreign letters kept (restaurant, sjarme — watch for c, q, x, z), or English spelling retained in casual use (laptop, weekend vs standard naweek).
- Whatever the stem's spelling, native endings attach natively and can respell it: naweek → naweke, laptop → laptoppie, telefoon → telefoontjie.
- A loan ending in a bare vowel takes the apostrophe-plural: foto → foto's, menu → menu's; consonant-final loans take plain -s (laptops).
- Assume the AWS has nativised an established loan — the "correct" Afrikaans spelling is usually closer to the sound than to the source-language original.
Now practice Afrikaans
Reading grammar gets you part of the way. The exercises are where it sticks — free, no signup needed.
Start learning Afrikaans→Related Topics
- Spelling with c, q, x and zB2 — The four 'foreign' letters c, q, x and z are mostly nativised out of Afrikaans loanwords — c becomes k or s, qu becomes kw, x becomes ks — so when one survives, it reliably flags an unassimilated loan or a proper name.
- The Afrikaans AlphabetA1 — The 26 Latin letters of Afrikaans, their names, the loanword letters c/q/x/z, and the diacritic-bearing vowels.
- The Loanword Layers of AfrikaansB2 — The historical strata of Afrikaans vocabulary — a Dutch core overlaid with Khoekhoe, Malay, Portuguese-creole, Bantu, and English borrowings — and why everyday words like baie are not Dutch at all.
- The Diminutive System: OverviewA1 — An introduction to the Afrikaans diminutive — the hugely productive -ie suffix family that conveys smallness, affection and softening, and is everyday adult speech.
- Plurals of LoanwordsB1 — How borrowed words form plurals in Afrikaans: most simply take -s (hotels, trekkers), vowel-final loans take apostrophe-s (foto's, taxi's), and Latin/Greek words vary between native and foreign plurals (museums or musea).