Late seventeenth century
A Cape Dutch creole speech community begins to develop
By the late seventeenth century, sustained contact among Dutch settlers, Khoikhoi speakers and enslaved people from Africa and Asia was producing locally distinctive varieties of Cape Dutch.
View in timelineThe late seventeenth-century Cape brought Dutch-speaking settlers into sustained contact with Khoikhoi speakers and enslaved people transported from Madagascar, South Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of Africa. Trade, agricultural labour, household life, schooling and Christian institutions created repeated settings in which people communicated across languages. These interactions contributed to locally recognisable varieties of Cape Dutch, while borrowing and grammatical change continued over generations.
Significance
The contact varieties formed part of the long development of Afrikaans. The evidence supports a multilingual formation process rather than a single founding moment.
Why it matters
These contact varieties formed an early stage in the longer, multilingual development of Afrikaans and recorded the social entanglement of settlement, trade, enslavement and domestic life at the Cape.
Disputed interpretations
Afrikaans developed over a long period; this entry describes an early process rather than the birth of a fully formed language.
Perspective notes
The surviving evidence consists largely of settler, church and administrative writing. Linguistic reconstruction can identify patterns of contact and borrowing, but it cannot recover the speech of every community or assign a single origin to the later language.