Afrikaans developed from the Dutch spoken by seventeenth-century settlers at the Cape, gradually absorbing words from Malay, Portuguese, Khoisan and Bantu languages. It is a West Germanic language, written in the Latin alphabet, and one of South Africa's official languages, with roughly seven million native speakers there and several million more who use it as a second language. Namibia also has a sizeable Afrikaans-speaking community, where the language long served as a lingua franca. Grammatically it is simpler than Dutch: verbs no longer change for person, grammatical gender has gone, and the double negative, as in "ek weet nie", is a signature feature. Dutch and Afrikaans speakers can still understand a good deal of each other's languages, particularly in writing, though the two have been diverging for three centuries.
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