A Brief Introduction of Cape Malay Afrikaans - Alexander Themas | PGO 2022

The Forgotten "Face" of Afrikaans: A Brief Introduction of Cape Malay Afrikaans The Afrikaans' language history is one of joy, pain, freedom, enslavement, defiance and subjugation; all at once. As one of the official languages of South Africa and also amongst the most spoken/understood language in South Africa and Namibia, its perception has been unfortunately affected by the modern history of Southern Africa, especially during apartheid. However the language itself is spoken by many people of different faith or skin colour, including by the Cape Malays; a 200.000 strong community of people in the Cape who traced parts of their roots to the banished and enslaved people from the Dutch colonial empire in Asia. Join the talk and get to know more about this unique dialect of Afrikaans and the history behinds it. Raised in a multilingual family and society, Alexander was born to an Indonesian couple and grew up in a provincial city in South Africa where he learnt Afrikaans and Sesotho as a child before returning to Indonesia. He then moved the the Netherlands and Poland for his higher educations where he dabbled in Dutch, German, Polish and Ambonese Malay. At the moment he's rather keen to try to learn more languages, especially those from the Southern Bantu and Malayo-Polynesian family groups. This video was recorded at the Polyglot Gathering Online 2022 (https://www.polyglotgathering.com).