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Afrikaans is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia with smaller numbers of speakers in Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Zambia. Due to the emigration of many White South Africans, there are an additional estimated 300,000 Afrikaans-speakers in the United Kingdom, with other substantial communities found in Perth, Australia; Toronto, Canada; and Auckland, New Zealand. It is the primary language used by two related ethnic groups: the Afrikaners (including Boers) and the Coloureds or kleurlinge/bruinmense (including Basters, Cape Malays and Griqua). These two groups are collectively known as Afrikaanses, roughly meaning "the language community of Afrikaans-speakers".

Many Afrikaans speakers do not consider themselves either Afrikaners or Coloureds, but simply Afrikaans-speaking South Africans. Geographically, the Afrikaans language is the majority language of the western one-third of South Africa (Northern and Western Cape, spoken at home by 69% and 58%, respectively). It is also the largest first language in the adjacent southern one-third of Namibia (Hardap and Karas, where it is the first language of 43% and 41%, respectively). It is the most widely used second language throughout both of these countries for the population as a whole, although the younger generation has better proficiency in English.

The name Afrikaans is simply the Dutch word for African, i.e. the African form of the Dutch language. The dialect became known as "Cape Dutch". Later, Afrikaans was sometimes also referred to as "African Dutch" or "Kitchen Dutch", although some now consider these terms pejorative. Afrikaans was considered a Dutch dialect until the late 19th century, when it began to be recognised as a distinct language, and it gained equal status with Dutch and English as an official language in South Africa in 1925. Dutch remained an official language until the new 1961 constitution finally stipulated the two official languages in South Africa to be Afrikaans and English (although, curiously, the 1961 constitution still had a sub-clause stipulating that the word "Afrikaans" was also meant to be referring to the Dutch language). The 1925 decision led Dutch to enter disuse and be replaced by Afrikaans for all purposes.

There are basically three dialects, of which the northeastern variant (which developed into a literary language in the Transvaal) forms the basis of the written standard. Within the Dutch-speaking zones of the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname, there is greater divergence among the dialects than there is between standard Dutch and standard Afrikaans.

It was originally the dialect that developed among the Afrikaner Protestant settlers and the indentured or slave workforce brought to the Cape area in southwestern South Africa by the Dutch East India Company (Dutch language: Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie - VOC) between 1652 and 1705. A relative majority of these first settlers were from the United Provinces (now Netherlands), though there were also many from Germany, a considerable number from France, some from Portugal, a few from Scotland, and various other countries. The indentured workers and slaves were South Indians, Malays, and Malagasy in addition to the indigenous Khoi and Bushmen.

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