The Official Languages of the Union Act, 1925 ( nl, Wet op de Officiële Talen van de Unie, 1925 ), was an
Act of the
Parliament of South Africa that included
Afrikaans
Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gra ...
as a variety of the
Dutch language
Dutch ( ) is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-Europea ...
.
The Act commenced on 27 May 1925, but deemed to have had effect since the creation of the Union in 1910, having the effect of making Afrikaans an official language of the
Union of South Africa
The Union of South Africa ( nl, Unie van Zuid-Afrika; af, Unie van Suid-Afrika; ) was the historical predecessor to the present-day Republic of South Africa. It came into existence on 31 May 1910 with the unification of the Cape, Natal, Tran ...
since that date.
Background
Ambiguity
The
South Africa Act of 1909—the constitution of
the Union—declared the English and Dutch languages to be the state's official languages.
Part 8, section 137, of the South Africa Act read:
Provision
Doubts soon arose about the status of the
Afrikaans language
Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gra ...
and whether its status as a Dutch
daughter language
In historical linguistics, a daughter language, also known as descendant language, is a language descended from another language, its mother language, through a process of genetic descent. If more than one language has developed from the same pro ...
implied it to be on equal footing.
The single substantive provision of the Official Languages Act reads:
Repeal
The South Africa Act and the Official Languages Act were repealed by the
Constitution of 1961, which reversed the position of Afrikaans and Dutch. Subsequently, English and Afrikaans were the official languages, and Afrikaans was deemed to include Dutch.
The
Constitution of 1983 removed any mention of Dutch altogether.
Bibliography
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External links
* "
Official Language of the Union Act, 1925" at
Wikisource
Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project (each instance usually re ...
{{Authority control
1925 in South African law
Repealed South African legislation