roep and skreeu — to call and shout

roep ("to call") and skreeu ("to shout, to scream") are the two verbs for raising your voice — one to summon someone, the other to cry out loudly. English keeps "call" and "shout" apart and so does Afrikaans, but roep hides a prepositional split that catches learners out: roep om ("call for", as in calling for help) uses a different preposition from roep vir ("call to a person"). Get that split right and you can summon the kids, call for help, and tell someone not to shout — all of it. For the wider family of communication verbs, see communication verbs; for the negative imperative moenie, see moenie.

The forms

Both are regular. Mind the spelling of the skreeu participle: geskreeu, with ee + u — the double e of the stem carries through and the u follows. The roep participle is the plain geroep.

roep — summoning someone

roep is what you do to get someone to come — you call the children, call the dog, call the next patient. With a person or animal as a plain object, roep means "summon": roep die hond ("call the dog"). It also commonly takes vir before the person, the same dative vir that marks the recipient of gee ("give") and sê ("tell"). Roep vir my means "call me" in the sense of "call to me / fetch me," not "telephone me."

Be careful: "call me" in the English sense of telephone me is not roep — that is bel my ("phone me") or the noun 'n oproep ("a phone call"). roep is your physical voice summoning someone within earshot, not a phone call.

roep om — calling for help

Here is the split this page exists for. When you call for something — help, the doctor, reinforcements — you use roep om, literally "call for." The classic, fixed phrase is om hulp roep ("call for help"). The om here points at what you are calling for, the goal of the cry, whereas vir points at the person you are calling to.

So the two prepositions divide the labour cleanly: roep vir + a person (call to someone), roep om + a thing you need (call for something). Mixing them up — roep vir hulp for "call for help" — is the most common slip, and it sounds wrong to a native ear.

oproep and inroep — the separable cousins

roep sits inside a couple of separable verbs worth knowing. oproep can mean "to summon up / call up" (and the noun 'n oproep is "a phone call"); inroep means "to call in" — to summon someone for assistance, like calling in an expert. As separable verbs, the prefix detaches in a main clause and the past tense slots -ge- between the two parts.

skreeu — crying out loudly

skreeu is pure volume: a loud cry, a scream, a shout of pain, fright, or anger. Unlike roep, it is not about summoning anyone — it is the raw loud sound itself. You skreeu in pain, skreeu with excitement at a rugby match, or skreeu at someone in anger (op iemand skreeu, "shout at someone").

The negative imperative there — moenie skreeu nie ("don't shout") — is the everyday way to tell someone to stop shouting. moenie … nie wraps around the verb to form a negative command; for the full pattern see moenie. To shout at a person, use op: sy het op die kinders geskreeu ("she shouted at the children").

roep versus skreeu

Reach for roep when the point is to summon — you want someone to come or to respond. Reach for skreeu when the point is loudness — a cry, a scream, raised anger. You can roep softly across a room, but you cannot skreeu softly; skreeu is loud by definition.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• Both regular: present roep / skreeu, perfect het geroep / het geskreeu, future sal roep / sal skreeu.
• Spell the participle geskreeu (ee + u), not geskree.
• roep vir
  • person ("call to someone"); roep om
    • thing needed ("call for something"). The fixed phrase is om hulp roep.
• roep is summoning by voice, not telephoning — for that, use bel.
• skreeu is loud crying out; shout at someone with op (op iemand skreeu). The negative command is moenie skreeu nie.