Alex speaking Afrikaans
This video was recorded by Fiel Sahir in Jakarta, Indonesia and features native speaker Alex. Afrikaans was spoken by around 6,860,000 people in South Africa as of 2013, then in decline. Afrikaans occupies the Low Franconian branch of West Germanic alongside modern Dutch, together part of the Indo-European language family. The classification of Afrikaans has fluctuated with time: it was long considered a dialect of Dutch until 1925 when it was officially recognized by the South African government as a distinct language, and it eventually came to replace Standard Dutch as an official language when the 1983 constitution removed all references to Dutch. The Afrikaans Language Monument constructed to mark the occasion reflects its significance to Afrikaners: an inscription leading to the monument's steps translates roughly to "This is important to us." Afrikaans is spoken in South Africa, Namibia, and parts of Botswana and Zimbabwe. The language originates from the early Dutch spoken by settlers from South Holland in the 17th and 18th centuries arriving in what is now South Africa.