Afrikaans

Afrikaans is written in the Latin script, spoken by about 9.3M people across 3 regions.

Unicode blocks used

Where it's spoken

Botswana, Namibia, South Africa

Notes

Acute is used to indicate different meaning (ál/al, nóú/nou) or to mark stress on the letters of vowels (a, e, i, o, u, y). The acute is not used when another mark is already present, for example 'dié' or 'die', 'kóéël' for 'koeël'. Diaeresis is used to mark a sequence is not a digraph (a, e, i, o, u): kontraäksie, beëdig, geïn, koöperasie, reünie. Grave is used on e to indicate the pronunciation [ɛ] or in proper names. Grave was used in 'òf ... òf' and 'nòg ... nòg' until the 1991 spelling and are now spelled with acute, some people still use the old spelling. Circumflex is used to indicate long mid-close vowels (e, i, o, u). Borrowed words like 'tête-à-tête', 'maître d’hôtel', 'El Niño', 'ångström' in the official spelling, or like 'pâtissier' occur but are not in the official spelling. These are not frequent their rare characters can be in auxiliary. AWS 2009 has ° ℓ Ω £ $ ¢ € µ ² ³, previous editions also had ƒ (for 'floryn', now as 'f.' or 'fl.').