Growth of Afrikaans As stated in earlier blogs the origins of Afrikaans lay in the slave, Khoi and Dutch interaction. Through this interaction the so called coloured ethnic group were born. The Afrikaans language was known as a baster Taal for a long time.The Cape Argus, published in Cape Town, called Afrikaans a ‘miserable, bastard jargon’, not worthy of the name of language at all However the rise of Afrikaner nationalism triggered by the South African War (1899-1902) and widespread Afrikaner poverty in the early decades of the twentieth century created the conditions for the rapid growth of Afrikaans as public language.By the end of the eighteenth century Cape Dutch had largely become what is now Afrikaans. In the Western Cape the main variety ofAfrikaans took root as the shared cultural creation, in countless small-scale localities, of Europeans and non-Europeans, whites and blacks, masters and slaves and servants. By the 1840s the first Afrikaans book, printed in Arabic script, was used in Muslim schools in Cape Town. By the 1850s it was the established medium of religious instruction in the Cape Muslim community. In the Boer Wars the English defeated the Boer republics. They introduced English as the only language of the ex-republics.This led to a rise in Afrikaner nationilism. The war also impoverished most Afrikaners. This eradicated the social and economic gap between Afrikaners. Thus Afrikaans became the symbol of Afrikaner identity. In 1925 D.F. Malan introduced a bill that added Afrikaans to Dutch and English as an official language.  ¶ 11/22/2006 10:47:00 AM