Afrikaans has been one of the two official languages of the Republic of South Africa (the other, of course, being English) since 1925 when an act of parliament replaced Dutch with Afrikaans. It is the mother tongue of at least five million South Africans as well as some tens of thousands of Namibians (of whom about half the speakers are blacks or other people of color). This volume puts a useful descriptive grammar at the disposal of a world public, presenting a more complete description of the grammar that any to date for non-native speakers. It concentrates on the most common grammatical and phonological variants of Afrikaans and describes the language very much as it is spoken now, which means riddled with thousands of Anglicisms which either are no longer recognized as such or, if they are, are now considered an integral part of the language. It also gives considerable attention to where Afrikaans differs from English. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR