Presentation - ECV2024-501

Children’s speech development: Afrikaans

Brenda LOUW, East Tennessee State University, USA (louwb1@mail.etsu.edu)
Mia LE ROUX, University of Pretoria, South Africa (mia.leroux@up.ac.za)
Salomé GEERTSEMA, University of Pretoria, South Africa (salome.geertsema@up.ac.za)

Afrikaans is spoken primarily in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, and by a significant number of emigrants around the globe. Afrikaans belongs to the West Germanic group and is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. It is one of 11 official languages in South Africa with a wide geographical, demographic, and racial distribution. Afrikaans has several varieties, namely Standard Afrikaans, and non-Standard Afrikaans, such as Cape Afrikaans, and Namakwaland Afrikaans. The language is characterized by 26 consonants, 34 consonant clusters, 12 monophthongs, three diphthongs, and an alphabetic writing system. Available research studies include children’s acquisition of Afrikaans phonemes across the age groups 2;0–7;0 years as well as the occurrence of phonological patterns across these age groups. A limited number of speech assessments have been developed in Afrikaans. Speech-language pathologists draw on a wide range of intervention approaches, mostly developed for English-speaking children.

Key words:
Afrikaans, speech, multilingual, communication, language, children’s development, interdisciplinary, international communities, assessment, intervention

Book Chapter:
Louw, B., Le Roux, M., & Geertsema, S. (2025). Afrikaans speech development. In S. McLeod (Ed.). The Oxford handbook of speech development in languages of the world. Oxford University Press.

Language overview presentation:

This presentation relates to the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals:

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