It may, thus, be quite advantageous for anyone wanting to connect with locals anywhere in the country to try their hand at Afrikaans, especially if they find learning an indigenous language challenging. Many people in South Africa speak two or more languages, with Afrikaans very often in the mix. These adherents are referred to as Afrikaners and they engage in activities such a volksspeletjies and annually host an Afrikaans festival, the ATKV (Afrikaanse Taal- en Kultuurvereniging)-fees where Afrikaans is celebrated in many art forms. Culturally, there are many who cling to it as a unifying element which embodies their culture and history. It is a language with a proud history, rich literature, drama, music and active movie-making industry. Afrikaans has many curious words and tongue twisters. Afrikaans is spoken by most ethnic groups in the country as a second or third language and is largely favoured as a first language in the western half. Back home, it is recognised as one of the official languages of South Africa, is widely used in business and industry and even has a monument erected in its honour in Paarl in the Western Cape. So, from the coldest reaches of the planet to some pretty cool and, even, hot locations in Africa and elsewhere, you will find Afrikaans spoken with relish. The current station is called SANAE IV and is operated by the South African National Antarctic Expedition (SANAE). You will even find concentrations of individuals speaking it on every continent of the globe, including Antarctica, where South Africa has maintained a research station since 1959. Many consider Afrikaans an easy language to learn, once you’ve become used to its guttural pronunciation, because it basically only has three tenses, viz, present, past and future no future progressive (continuous) or past perfect, etc.įurther, Afrikaans is the language with the widest geographical spread as it is spoken in all of South Africa’s nine provinces, as well as in Namibia (where it is recognised as a national language), Botswana and Zimbabwe. These are some of the comments you would come across when enquiring about this language for the first time. A European language spoken in Africa, some would say. To learn more, see the privacy policy.Afrikaans, the youngest language in the world! The third-most spoken language in South Africa. Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: Elastic Search, WordNet, and note that Reverse Dictionary uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. The definitions are sourced from the famous and open-source WordNet database, so a huge thanks to the many contributors for creating such an awesome free resource. In case you didn't notice, you can click on words in the search results and you'll be presented with the definition of that word (if available). For those interested, I also developed Describing Words which helps you find adjectives and interesting descriptors for things (e.g. So this project, Reverse Dictionary, is meant to go hand-in-hand with Related Words to act as a word-finding and brainstorming toolset. That project is closer to a thesaurus in the sense that it returns synonyms for a word (or short phrase) query, but it also returns many broadly related words that aren't included in thesauri. I made this tool after working on Related Words which is a very similar tool, except it uses a bunch of algorithms and multiple databases to find similar words to a search query. So in a sense, this tool is a "search engine for words", or a sentence to word converter. It acts a lot like a thesaurus except that it allows you to search with a definition, rather than a single word. The engine has indexed several million definitions so far, and at this stage it's starting to give consistently good results (though it may return weird results sometimes). For example, if you type something like "longing for a time in the past", then the engine will return "nostalgia". It simply looks through tonnes of dictionary definitions and grabs the ones that most closely match your search query. The way Reverse Dictionary works is pretty simple.
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