Thread by @incunabula

The South African language Afrikaans developed out of Dutch, and was codified in the late 19th cent. But little known is that its earliest written form was in ARABIC, written by the Cape Malay population from the 1830's. Here, from an 1880's bilingual Koran, is Surah 67 verse 1.

A new book based on the research of the late Bo-Kaap (the historic Malay quarter of Cape Town) historian Achmat Davids debunks stereotypes about the language & shows the contribution made by the Malay community, descended from slaves brought to the Cape.
iol.co.za/capeargus/news…

The transliterated Arabic shown here is VERY close to Afrikaans, something slightly obscured by the formal Afrikaans translation. The transliterated "°n vārlik Allah ta`ālā is bās fir aldī its" is actually spoken Afrikaans: "en waarlik Allah ta`ālā issie baas van alle dinges."

What's interesting is the politics: under Apartheid this might have been downplayed because it would have delegitimised Afrikaans - now, in 2019, it's being seized on by the Afrikaans community precisely because it legitimizes the language by underpinning its multicultural roots.

Arabic has been used to transliterate local languages almost everywhere that Islam flourished (as, for the same reasons, has Hebrew). What's significant here though, is that these mid-19th century texts PREDATE the codification and writing down of Afrikaans by Dutch speakers.

Apart from one isolated 16th century manuscript of German written in Arabic letters (a 1588/9 Lutheran hymnal [Cod. A.F. 437] as shown below), the 74 documented surviving Arabic-Afrikaans texts are the ONLY examples of any Germanic language written in Arabic script.

To contextualise: at the time this was written, there were no published Afrikaans translations of Christian texts at all, not even hymnals. The first published Afrikaans translation of even a small portion of the Bible was in 1893, and it wasn't translated in full until 1933.

Abu Bakr Effendi’s "Bayan ad-Din" or "Uiteensetting van die godsdiens" [Exposition of Religion] written entirely in the Afrikaans language transliterated into Ottoman script, and in the absence of facilities for publishing Arabic books at the Cape, printed in 1877... in Istanbul.

Not all the Afrikaans written in Arabic script at the Cape was for religious purposes. This is an election pamphlet for the 1884 campaign of Anders Ohlsson, a famous beer brewer from Cape Town. The script is Arabic, the language though (in lines 2 and 3) is Afrikaans. 1/2

Here is the transliteration and English translation of the Arabic text: Lines 2 and 3 are definitely in Afrikaans, line 1 is mainly in English, and lines 4-6 are in Arabic. 2/2