Afrikaans (UK: , US: , meaning 'African') is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their slaves. Afrikaans gradually began to develop distinguishing characteristics during the course of the 18th century. Now spoken in South Africa, Namibia and (to a lesser extent) Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, estimates circa 2010 of the total number of Afrikaans speakers range between 15 and 23 million. Afrikaans is considered by most linguists to be a creole language only partially, rather than fully. Afrikaans linguistics scholars likewise consider it partially creole.

An estimated 90 to 95% of the vocabulary is of Dutch origin, although Afrikaans has adopted words from other languages, including German and the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa. Nonetheless, there are a few key differences with Dutch, including a more analytic-type morphology and grammar, and a spelling that expresses Afrikaans pronunciation rather than standard Dutch. Still, there is a large degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages, especially in written form.

With about 13.5% of the population of South Africa (7 million people) being native speakers, it is the third most spoken language in the country, after Zulu and Xhosa. It has the widest geographic and racial distribution of the 11 official languages and is widely spoken and understood as a second or third language, although Zulu and English are estimated to be understood as a second language by a much larger proportion of the population. It is the majority language of the western half of South Africa—the provinces of the Northern Cape and Western Cape—and the first language of 75.8% of Coloured South Africans (4.8 million people), 60.8% of White South Africans (2.7 million people), 1.5% of Black South Africans (600,000 people), and 4.6% of Indian South Africans (58,000 people).