Why was the first Afrikaans written in Arabic Letters? 

I'm a Cape Malay Muslim and can say that I had only a vague idea of Afrikaans in the context of my Cape Malay heritage. Because of course, during Apartheid we weren't thought anything about our history and heritage. Sadly, even in a post-Apartheid South Africa, this remains to be the case in schools. Thank you for doing this video. It means more than you can know.

As a South African I had no idea about the Islamic/ Malaysian influence on the society even though I was surrounded by muslims and Cape Malay in Cape Town. I did always wonder why the racial slur for black people was so similar to the arabic word for "non believer" now I know why. Also what is the Dutch word for banana because I assumed piesang was Dutch.

Really cool! This reminds me of Arabitsa (Arabica, Арабіца), known today as the Belarusian Arabic alphabet - a modified form of the Arabic script, developed by the Muslim Tatar community of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, or Lipka Tatars, to write primarily in the form of Ruthenian from which modern Belarusian developed (later also in Polish).

Im Cape Malay. Thanks so much for bringing part of our history to light. My grandfather still has some Afrikaans manuscripts/books on islam written in the arabic script. I also think there might be a lot more of these manuscripts/books around today.

Dit is van kardinale belang dat hierdie tipe kultuur-historiese inligting vir die nageslagte bewaar word. Ek is seker dat baie van die Afrikaners van sowel Maleisiese asook Europese afkoms hierdie inligting behoort te sien. Dankie dat dit met ons gedeel is!

Kind of the reverse of the situation in Malta with Maltese, an Arabic derived language with a ton of Romance influence, written in the Latin alphabet, and spoken by a Christian population.

As a South African I would like to say that “Cape Malay” (a catch all phrase for the mixed group of people descending from Muslim countries and South Asia) history and culture is very interesting. I look forward to the video

As a Cape Coloured, it brings a smile to my face to see someone from overseas notice and spread info about my people's contributions to our beautiful language. It would be amazing if you made a video going deeper into Afrikaans' development.

"Knap gedaan, jy het jou goed van jou taak gekwyt.". As an Afrikaner and as a teacher, that was extremely informative and interesting. I always enjoy your videos covering topics of my country and my language, and I appreciate the effort you put in to pronounce the words correctly. I can not be the only one who enjoys your videos and would like to see more content covering Afrikaans. The comments you made about the written and spoken Afrikaans is spot on, as I often have trouble understanding texts out of older Afrikaans books that I have.

“ilms” comes from the Arabic “ilm (علم)” meaning knowledge and “dalil” comes from the Arabic “dalīl (دليل)” meaning evidence.

Can I just say that I appreciate how respectful and understanding you are in general? You never come accros as dismissive and derogatary towards any culture or language group or people, and your just very respctful in general. I say this as someone who is brown and always worries just a little about the possibility of someone being overtly racist, so seeing this is nice and very uplifting. I also like seeing how much effort you put into trying to pronounce everything correctly.

My grandfather (born 1903) schooled in the Cape was educated in Dutch, which he found quite foreign as a young child. For me the most interesting thing is the lack of French and German influence given that I believe they made up 35% of European immigrants to the Cape up to 1805.

I learned Persian and the Persian, Arabic-based alphabet while I worked in Afghanistan. I ended up studying and learning quite a bit of Afrikaans over there from having a number of South African friends and colleagues. I had learned Indonesian more than 15 years ago, and although I had become quickly fluent, I forgot a lot of it. It was fascinating to see a lot of this knowledge coming together so beautifully in this video. I had trouble reading the A. Afrikaans text but did get a good chunk after some deciphering. Beautiful, fascinating video, bringing together such gorgeous languages and cultures. Dankie, terima kasih, tashakur!

As a Malay from Malaysia, the story and existence of the Cape Malays has always been fascinating to me. I even have a classmate in my school who was a Cape Malay from South Africa.

I'm from Malaysia 🇲🇾 and the fact we have this kind of influence in other country is utterly mind blowing🤯. I never knew we have ever adopt Arabic script(Jawi as we called it) in another language that is not us 😂.

omg this is so fascinating to see. As a native Dutch speaker, I was always fascinated by Afrikaans and our lexical similarity. As somebody that can read both the Arabic script and knows Dutch, this was such a crazy linguistic adventure. Interesting that Malay-Afrikaans has letters to sound out Dutch like the -ng sound. Since I’m muslim, the arabic words were no issue for me XD. I always speak Dutch to Afrikaners when I meet them and we have no trouble communicating. Unfortunately, there’s been times where we had to switch to English because of fluency issues with Afrikaans. I love how Afrikaans keeps words so unnessarily pure especially with new coined terms or technology like in Dutch we’d say homepage, they’d say thuisblad, or tosti becomes braaibroodje loool. I worked in customer service and we had lots of Afrikaanse customers. It’s always fun to hear and read Afrikaans because it’s exactly written how we speak in Amsterdam minus the Afrikaans grammar. Het was echt een interessante video om te kijken. ان فر ده منسن دي دت كونان لايسن ان فاينه دخ نح حه lol

Please do a video on the origins and development of the Afrikaans language. I had no idea about the Arab-Afrikaans history! I’m so impressed at your Afrikaans accent. Fascinating video, thank you.

Please do a video about the Afrikaans language, it is so in-depth and complex ❤❤

As a Cape Malay I’m familiar with this history but found your detail fascinating and insightful/ sharing widely 😀.

4:44 I love the fact that you used the flag of Majapahit, an Empire based on the island of Java from 1293 to around 1500 also known as Wilwatikta, and their flag is one of the oldest flag with red and white stripes, older then the flag of US and flag of the EIC and flag of Malaysia.

As an arabic speaker, I can tell you that dalil is also a word in arabic and it means "evidence". I'm halfway thru the video and it's really interesting!

as a malay Malaysian this is astounding! subbed!

*But seriously now:* Afrikaans: Verstaan jy my? Dutch: Versta jij mij? Norwegian: Forstår du meg? Danish: Forstår du mig? Swedish: Förstår du mig? Afrikaans: Dan kan ons saam praat. Dutch: Dan kunnen wij samen praten. Norwegian: Da kan vi prate sammen. Swedish: Då kan vi prata tillsammans. Danish: Så kan vi tale sammen.

I've never heard a foreigner pronounce the word "Afrikaans" correctly before today. Good job my guy ✌️

Some interesting facts: the South African skewered meat dish, sosatie, takes it origin from sate. Also, the first islamic school was founded by Sheikh Yusuf, who was from Makassar in Indonesia, but was exiled to South Africa. When he died in South Africa, the location was named after his place of origin: Macassar.

When learning Afrikaans in the 1960s (by shortwave radio), I remember being told that the first thing written in Afrikaans was a poem written in response to the second seizure of the Cape by the British. A few years later, I heard that there were Afrikaans documents written in Arabic script. Glad to hear more of the story.

@19:37 Dalil and Ilm are also Arabic words which went into Malay. In Malay, Ilm is always written as ilmu and pronounced as it is spelt ' ill-moo ". And Ilmu means knowledge.

"Baie goëie geskiedenis stuk van ons unieke taal". I'm a Afrikaner so Afrikaans is my home language. Love these kinds of videos really doing proper research on the language history. Afrikaans has Arabic, German, French, Dutch, Portuguese and even native African languages influences. Yes it's base language is Dutch but it used all the others to develop its structures and words over time and truely grown to be unique in itself

Inherited from my father-in-law (he was from the Moluccan archipelago): I still have one of his textbooks "Beberapa Tjeritera Melajoe" / "Maleisch Leesboek" (1920:7) - both titles in Dutch and Malay of old (now: “Maleis” and “Beberapa Cerita Melayu”) - with the stories themselves printed in an adapted Arabic script. There was already a long-standing tradition, at least in what is now Indonesia, to write the Malay language in “jawi”, the adapted Arabic script. Many words in Malay (and nowadays Bahasa Indonesia) come from other languages (Arabic - in the video "dalîl" and “'ilm” are called Malay words but they are purely Arabic - Persian - “pasar” from Farsi “bâzâr”, English: “bazaar” - Portuguese, Dutch, Sanskrit - "agama", mentioned in the video, is Sanskrit - Chinese, et cetera). The first word of the previously mentioned reading book in "jawi" is "hikâyah" - the Arabic word for “story”. There is currently a lot of talk in the Netherlands about slavery. But almost exclusively about the - horrible - Trans-Atlantic slave trade (in which Dutch traders fully participated), almost never about the horrific things that Dutch colonists did in what is now Indonesia and South Africa. For example, the Moluccan Banda Islands were almost completely "depopulated" by Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the founder of Batavia (now: Djakarta): most inhabitants were slaughtered. The others were taken away as enslaved people. In the eastern Dutch colonies, slavery was just as bad as - if not more horrific than - in the western Dutch colonies. And if there is one original Dutch word known worldwide (an infamous word, rightly so), it is "apartheid". And the “architect” of “apartheid”, Hendrik Verwoerd, was born in South Africa … oh no: in Amsterdam.

As an Afrikaner (from Voortrekker stock) I enjoyed this very much. The Afrikaans language is so rich and influenced by so manny cultures that a consideration of the Koi-San influence on the Afrikaans language or the comparison to Flemish might be of interest to make a video on. Lastly hank-you for keeping our language interesting.

As a Malaysian I was blown away by the very existence of a small Malay community in South Africa when I first found it out a few years ago, complete with similar cultures like the wedding rituals. This documentary just adds more interesting knowledge I’ve never even thought of. Turns out, colonization had bigger effects to the society more so than what our History textbooks had portrayed. I would also like to highlight the lexicons used to compare the modern Malay and Afrikaans language side by side, since a few of the words were either old school or just borrowed from our neighbour Indonesia, which surprise surprise, is another former Dutch colony. Words like Jepun (Jepang), anting-anting (kraboe), perompak (rampok) are just some of the immediate things I noticed. Great video nevertheless! We learn something new everyday.

Hi I'm an afrikaans speaker, the video was fantastic and would love to see more. I would like to add tho, cape afrikaans and boer afrikaans do differ still to this day. With the cape afrikaans dialect being closer to Dutch phonetically and the Afrikaner or Boer dialect being closer too it grammatically ( I see grammatically but I'm unsure... It's more that larger words are used etc... I think this might be the effect of having the Statenbijbel as only reference guide to grammar when we were on trek and settled in the transvaal) It would be interesting to see a video on this. As the Boers or Afrikaners were quite separated from the Cape for a hundred odd years or soo with more old Dutch influence. Whereas the cape got more English influence because the British colonized it.

As a Flemish woman who has lived in Malaysia I really enjoyed this video!

This is a mind-blowing episode! Afrikaans in Arabic script!! 😳

Ik lees Afrikaans en vind dat het klinkt als mijn opa uit Friesland. Ik vind het gewoon een Nederlands dialect, dat door de politiek niet als zodanig werd/wordt erkend. Leuk als bijleesliteratuur is 'die swye van Mario Salviati" van Etienne van Heerden. Bedankt voor deze leuke leerzame video.

I knew the son of an Imam from Cape Town in Sydney NSW. I knew that Afrikaans had been written in adapted Arabic (there's a Jawi ng in there). Your Arabic flowed

What an interesting and informative video! As an Afrikaans speaking individual, I can commend you for your efforts. You didn't "butcher" it. In Afrikaans culture we really appreciate it when people make the effort to learn and speak our language and will never take offense! Afrikaans truly was a "kitchen language" that got a mish-mash of vocabulary even from the local tribes. As it originated here in South Africa, we regard it as truly indigenous and representative of the history of South Africa as it is so intertwined with our development as a country. We do not however regard Afrikaans as a pidgin or creole language, as the language has also developed further and formed its own vocabulary and style or prose to be sufficiently distinguishable from all the languages which it originated from. You've touched on the subject of the Dutch and slavery of non-Christians. A point to consider was that over time the Dutch Settlers - who came to South Africa as "Free Burghers" started disassociating with Dutch- and later English rule and already referred to themselves as "Africaanders" in 1707. These "Africaanders" were regarded as low-class by the Dutch, French and English. They were not as wealthy and worked in close contact with the slaves and indigenous people. There were also reports of interracial offspring and marriages. These "Africaanders" had already started converting slaves and indigenous people to Christianity before the amelioration laws of 1808. I am just glad we didn't retain arabic writing!

PLEEAAASE do that video about the development of Afrikaans. I went to South Africa this summer, and it was one of the most politically and historically fascinating places on Earth.

Thank you for this video. The history and the development of the Afrikaans language is indeed a bit complicated, it would be absolutely wonderful to see you create and release more content about this.

Ah this is excellent Hilbert! Ek het beslis baie by jou geleer in hierdie video, dankie. Please do tell us more about Afrikaans. I speak it daily and never knew any of this. Baie insiggewend!

Pretty cool story indeed. I lived in NL for some time and picked up Dutch. As a native Arabic speaker, it is fascinating to learn about such interconnections.

I speak Dutch and can read the Arabic script and know some Arabic yet really struggled with reading that lol.

verskriklik interesant! I knew some of this, but had no idea about the Arabic script early writing, we also have a few Arabic words in Afrikaans, mainly due to the Cape-Malay influence, some of the most famous I cannot repeat as it is a racial slur but means Pagan or heretic in Arabic, of course the most interesting words in Afrikaans is from local African languages, too numerous to mention, but I especially love all the onomatopoeic ones for animals which sound like them like Kudu (the sound of the hooves when they run) or Hadidah (literally what they sound like), anyway love it, great research, so glad you mention the Cape-Malay Cuisine, it is the best, and also worth a shout-out is there architectural influences, compared to the dutch style (kaapse Duitse gewels) compared to the colourful houses of 'Bo Kaap' the Malay area, and the Cape Malay Carnival known locally as the 'The Kaapse Klopse' highly recommended to visit during this time. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-VDHceOVlWMI.html

Fascinating subject, wonderfully researched. Thank you!

Your graphics and presentation are always so well done. It's a pleasure, really.

22:01 It was still called Constantinople then (Konstantiniyye), the name Istanbul came after the Turkish War of Independence

Some of this information is represented well in the French Hugenote museum in Franschhoek, Cape Town. There's artifacts and images of some of the earliest written Afrikaans there. The focus there is more on the oppression French people faced from the church before Hugenotes fled to South Africa, US, etc. If you're ever in Franchshoek, I'd recommend going - the history is fascinating.

UIeindelik! Thank you for making this video. It was much needed. Vertel vir die mense.

For context my grandfather was a white Anglo Canadian. My grandfather was an inorganic chemist (metallurgist I think) and some time during apartheid (but before the sanctions), he and some of his colleagues went on a business trip to South Africa, one of his colleagues, who went was either Indonesian or Malay, was confused about which bathroom to use, but he was told that because he was Canadian he would use the white bathroom. Just an interesting story relating to the complicated race politics of South Africa, in particular concerning Malay people

Wow as an Afrikaans speaker this was really interesting. Your Afrikaans have improved lol

I love learning more about my South African heritage.🇦🇺💛🇿🇦

love this! thank you. interestingly, your pronunciation is so good that I can clearly distinguish two distinct accents in your tutoring. there is some northern influence, I'm guessing Pretoria and some Southern, Northern suburbs of capetown.

I'm honestly shocked to see my people's story actually being told on the internet. Normally this is just something learnt in Cape Town history classes in school. Jyt n baie goeie video gemaak 🙏

0:24 Me a Formula 1 fan: "OH GOD MAKE IT STOP" F1 jokes aside, well researched video, man! As an Indonesian, I'm fascinated with the connection of Indonesian/Malay language and dialects with others, and it surprises me to find out just how influential Malayan influence was to this Dutch dialect of Afrikaans. If only Malay had more influence in Afrikaans, it could've been a Dutch-Indonesian/Malay bridge language Extra: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-CVUhtR_W_dY.html I found a video of an Indonesian deciphering an Arabic Afrikaans text. Perhaps this would be interesting

Fascinating! Well done Hilbert.

enjoyed the video a lot. keep finding interesting stuff like this.

_Ofcause_ I would love to see more videos on our language. I _always_ respect it when foreigners show an interest in my language, and I love the outsider perspective they bring to it, which is not very common. You have gone in more depth into the Arabic Afrikaans than I as a native speaker ever did, and I think you did a better job reading that Arabic Afrikaans than I would've. I do not really care if its a "creole language." Technically, isnt English also a "creole" language, with influences from German, Gallic, Danish and French? Isnt _all_ languages creole to some extend? And while it is similar enough for me to understand Dutch, I do believe its also different enough to be regarded as a language rather than a dialect.

Hi Hilbert. And Excellent program you have made. The text you analyzed is the beginning of the Afrikaans introduction of the book by my great grandfather - The Shaykh of Knowledge Abuw Bakr Effendi (1814 - 1880). This book was written in 1869 and 1500 copies were printed in Istanbul in 1876. I am in possession of the original manuscript as well as the printed version. If , ever, you would need or like I can send you copies. The original consists of about 800 pages and is only one of the books that were printed as one volume.

Wow what a video!!! Great and FASCINATING topic!! Well done sir!!

Great video. Well researched and so informative. Had no idea about this. Really amazing

Love this video and I love your commitment to pronouncing things correctly! Dalil and ilm also come from Arabic (perhaps they were borrowed into Malay first and then into Arabic Afrikaans). Also, in the Arabic script you've written 'aalam instead of dunya (which I get is because you can't read the script but they pretty much mean the same thing anyway) and jannat instead of jannah. When talking about paradise by itself you would say jannah but when using it in the possessive grammatical construct (known as idafa in Arabic) i.e. 'paradise of something' you would say jannat e.g. jannat ul-firdaws meaning garden of paradise. Btw, many other languages used to use the Arabic script as well like Bosnian and Swahili.

My previous comment may have sounded a bit critical but it wasn't. I found the video excellent and would love you to go deeper into the development of Afrikaans. I also love your burst of the Wilhelmus near the start. I think this is one of the most stirring national anthems as well as being the oldest.

Thank you for your time and research , A follow up video will be great to further expand on the History of this beautiful language .

Very interesting video. Please do another video on the early development of Afrikaans as it's also unclear how and where it started to deviate from Dutch.

The Middle East’s influence on the west is so cool and interesting imo.

Absolutely loved watching this! As a "boer" living in the UK.. And doing business in The Netherlands,I love to say Afrikaans is the most modern language on the planet! As for Cape Malay cuisine- 200…%.best food in the World!! Keep up the great work!💕

I would love more Afrikaans videos, it's a very fascinating and unique language origin-wise.

What an interesting video! I had no idea Islam or the Arabic script reached South Africa before the 20th century. I found your pronunciation of Arabic words to be very good. I just wanted to point out that both "ilmi" and "daleel" are derived ultimately from Arabic even though they might also be Malay words. Thumbs up 😊

At 16:48 the standard Dutch shouldn't be written "verheve" but rather "verheven". This mistake is easily made however because most (modern) Dutch speakers don't pronounce this -n. I always find it funny to see how Afrikaans has standardized this in their spelling. Thank you for this interesting video and I would certainly like to see more videos about the history of Afrikaans!

Fascinating and erudite video! Thank you. My own feeling was always that the Afrikaans language may already have been fairly highly developed even before 1652 as the voertaal on board ships of the VOC. After all, a ship's crew with a mixture of Dutch and non-Dutch speakers would generate their own argot with a simplified grammar. The transcription of these texts are a fascinating indication of how pronunciations had changed by the early 19th Century (e.g. 'iek'). I'll share it with some South African friends.

During my high school years I read a book which referred to this (Afrikaans in Arabic script) , and tried to find more information about it. At the time (before the Internet) I could not find any works of reference that mentions this, and even started doubting my memory. Thank you so much for this video!

Hi I am Afrikaans and did my school years a very long time ago.... We learned about the Afrikaans language origins and history and the influences of other languages on the development of Afrikaans. The video was very informative and I quite enjoyed it. Thank you so much! 😀

That was excellent. I was not aware of a lot of what you covered; though, I am very fond of South African history. I look forward to your next video on Afrikaans. Also, do you have it in the works to do a video on the Afrikaner who left after the Boer war and settled in Argentina?

Kitab and Dunya are Arabic words that were later incorporated into Malay. Same thing for dalil and ilmu.

A very interesting piece. Please bring us some more on the development of Afrikaans. I was born in Australia but have lived in South Africa & Namibia since 1970 and speak fluent German as well.

Thanks to all who prepared and broadcasted this great report

As an Afrikaans speaking South African I have learned something today. Very interesting video and you are right Cape Malay food is amazing.

As a person who can speak, read and write Arabic, English and Dutch. This is tbh wholesome. Gonna bring A. Afrikaans back people! 😂

Just came across this video in my feeds...I love this video.. very interesting keep up the good work ❤️I would love to know more. Arabic is such a deep language.

Fantasties! Best description on this history I've seen yet. It's part of my heritage and has always been an an obsession to me, mainly as a powerful antidote to the grinding stereotyping that Apartheid has rendered us as South Africans. I'm so happy your video has this effect! ps When I read Afrikaans in the Arabic script it makes my head spin, and I always chuckle to myself, because I know how special it is to be able to do that.

Very interesting indeed. As a Malaysian Malay, would love to learn more about the cape malays

Hello Hilbert. I found this interesting, as South Africa was significant in British history, but also because the way that language gets adapted is fascinating. As well as this, most of my classmates at one school were Muslim. Lastly, I may have Indian ancestry and someone actually asked my grandmother how she would let her daughter marry a black man, meaning what you referred to as coloured. I commented before that my Royal Navy father missed his army brother in Singapore by one day, just after WW2, the latter being sent to Dutch East Indies, whilst my dad was sent out with a barefooted Sikh driver to help with medical needs in the British controlled area for a short while.

It is absolutely fascinating. Would love to hear more about the development of Afrikaans.

Really enjoyed this! If you are a non South African your contribution is extremely appreciated! Well done! And yes would love to know more about the history of Afrikaans and South Africa in general. Pronunciation is absoluut uitsteekend!

I want that video about the histoy of Afrikaans! Please. With excerpts from the important/national figures writting in the language, that'd be great.

SubhanAllah.. as a south African I never knew any of this.. thanks again, most appreciated

Very interesting history! Thank you for sharing 😀

As a Brit who grew up in Durban, South Africa, and returned to England before the end of Apartheid, I found your video fascinating. Just to note that Afrikaans is more like Flemish. I discovered this when visiting my English uncle in Ramsgate, Kent, and his Belgian wife. I was visiting them with another friend from SA who also lived in London. My Aunt received a phonecard from Belgium and my friend and I looked at each other in awe - because we realised we could understand Flemish! We discovered that the Duntch spoken by the early settlers was closer to Flemish as Belgium was once part of the Netherlands.

This seems interesting to learn fully

Fascinating!

Great video! Love to get your take on the development of Afrikaans. I knew there was a strong Malay influence but would love to hear more as well as the influence from other African languages (and the French settlers).

Superb history, I am pleased to have found your channel. I found Afrikaans very interesting in my visits to ZA as I had worked in NL for 4 years and did not find Dutch difficult. The universal Dutch facility in English was a problem in the early days as I'd often have to ask them to refrain from using English as I struggled through, torturing their language in new and excruciating ways.

Hilbert. Since you seem to like language development and crossover, let me give you a challenge. Please give us a video on the development of Cantonese in Victoria Australia during and after the gold rush.

Thanks for the interest in Afrikaans. Interesting fact, did you know there's still large Dutch immigrant communities living in South Africa, they mostly speak Afrikaans now with a Dutch accent. They gather in the "Vrye Gereformeerde Kerke in Suid-Afrika" (there's churches in Cape Town, Pretoria and Johannesburg). Search that in RU-vid and you'll find their accents hilarious.

As an Afrikaans-speaking South African, I found this video interesting. Also, your pronunciation of Afrikaans is very good. I first found out about early Afrikaans being written in Arabic script from a school textbook which was published in the early 90s, when the old government was already on its way out.

Baie dankie. Very informative video. Yes, we do WANT more.....

0:54 as a swede im suprised by how much i can understand of those sentences

We still use this script until today in Riau, Sumatera. 🙂🙂

I thank you so much for confirming. I read this in a coffee table book published in SA in 1998 in Cape Town where I first read this exact history. Thank you

Yes, we would like to see more videos on Afrikaans Awesome video