Finally, coming back to these polls to explain what I think the "correct" answer is and while I don't wish to single anyone out, this reblog here does demonstrate something that a lotta of people don't understand - the development of Afrikaans as a language.

While one could definitely argue that Afrikaans is a colonial language. It's adoption by the White Afrikaner minority as their national tongue, it's usage as the main tongue of the Apartheid government and its forceful implementation by said government on black kids who were primarily educated in English or their own languages are definitive parts of Afrikaans history that cannot be erased or changed. It's a language that was utilised by settlers to crush dissent, eradicate indigenous languages and enforce Afrikaner supremacy in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

However, it is not a "language created by settlers", at least not any more than Jamaican Patois, Papiamento or Haitian Creole are. Afrikaans has a long, storied development which I won't go through in detail but let's get some major points out the way:

Afrikaans developed specifically out of the relationship between Master and Slave/Inboekseling at the Cape. The local Khoemana-speaking clans and the slaves imported from across the Indian Ocean influenced the language in a myriad of ways, from its simplified grammar to its non-Dutch vocabulary.

The Khoena clans in the region had developed a kind of pidgin language during their long contact with the Dutch and this pidgin would go onto influence how other non-Dutch speakers would develop their own forms of Dutch

South Asian (Indian, Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi) slaves would influence the language via their knowledge of Portuguese as much of the Dutch colonies in South Asia were originally owned by the former and thus knew it as a lingua-franca. This has been described as "Malayo-Portuguese" but should probably be more properly termed "Indo-Portuguese".

Slaves from the Indo-Malay Archipelago brought with them Malay which soon became a prestige language as well as a language of religious instruction as the region became the primary origin for slaves in the colony. Books were written in jawi script and Arabic up until the late 18th century.

As early Afrikaans began to become more consistently spoken throughout the westernmost parts of the colony, Malay subsided as the major language of religious education and was replaced by Afrikaans written in an Arabic script. These books are the first documents written in "Kitchen Dutch" (the Dutch of those who work in Kitchens - slaves) as opposed to "High Dutch" and it was only several decades later on eve of the Boer Wars did the White settlers adopt the language (and Afrikaner identity) for themselves.

Slaves from Portuguese East Africa (Masbiekers) brought with them more Portuguese influence to the extent where there were many elderly slave descendants in the Cape who could still speak it in the early 20th century.

It was only during the late 19th century that Dutch speakers adopted the language officially - poorer "Afrikaner" settlers adopted the language due to contact with former slaves and inboekselings, by the late 19th century large swathes of the population did not know "real Dutch".

Today, as it was through most of history, the vast majority of Afrikaans speakers are "Coloureds" who are descendants of the slaves and indigenous people who formed the language in the early Colony.

While there's a lot more to go into as to the politics of its adoption by the Dutch and the ways it developed, this does show that rather than the language being entirely colonial and created by whites, it is more accurate to say that it is a creole language that was essentially created by slaves working in Dutch kitchens and fields.

Sources for further reading:

Shell, R.C.H. (1994). 'The Tower of Babel: The slave trade and creolisation at the Cape, 1652 - 1834' in Eldredge, E.A. and Morton, F. (eds) Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labour on the Dutch Frontier.

Jappie, S. (2011). From the Madrasah to the Museum: the Social of the Kietaabs of Cape Town.

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(source, trigger warning for descriptions and video screenshots of the acts of violence that were enacted. more detaills are provided in this linked Instagram post as well.)