اَرَابيسي اَفْريكَانْسْ Arabic Afrikaans

Can you write Afrikaans in Arabic or Jawi?

Arabic Afrikaans, or Afrikaans written using the Arabic alphabet, is generally accepted as the first written form of Afrikaans. Many Arabic Afrikaans writings – such as student notebooks, voting posters, publications and manuscripts – have been preserved; thus far, 74 of these works written between 1845 and 1957 have been discovered and identified by experts. Among these are excellent examples of the earliest Afrikaans literature. In addition, many more Arabic-Afrikaans writings are privately owned, which the ATM is happy to digitise for future generations.

According to Michael Jonas, director of the ATM, the aim of these Arabic Afrikaans workshops and competitions is to make a modern contribution to this writing tradition. “Our mission, after all, is to also highlight the lesser-known histories of Afrikaans and to celebrate the rich diversity of Afrikaans’s development as well as its modern forms. That is why we want to encourage people to reaffirm their participation in this language in this way,” he says. “In the Taalmuseum in Paarl we give a lot of recognition to Abu Bakr Effendi, who played a prominent role in the development of Arabic Afrikaans and thereby also Afrikaans in the 1800s in the Bo-Kaap. We would like to see the Afrikaans community build on this.”

• Source
• From Muslim Afrikaans comes “toelies”, for Arabic script and letters, and also as a verb for ‘to write’: The first textbook in Afrikaans was a kitaab getoelies in Arabic. From the Indonesian word ‘tulis’ – ‘to write’.

The Afrikaans Language Museum and Monument’s Arabic-Afrikaans competition 2022 and workshop received a lot of media attention. See the article and interviews below, in Afrikaans and English.