Afrikaans personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

Afrikaans was the language my grandmother used for counting, complaining and praying, and English was the one she used for everything else. For years I understood the tone of it without the words. When I finally sat down with a beginner's grammar, what struck me was how transparent the structure looked next to the German I was studying at school: the double negative, the loss of verb inflection, the plain past tense built almost entirely with 'het'. My German teacher and I spent a wet lunchtime comparing word orders, and I came away wanting to know why one West Germanic language simplified so drastically while its relatives did not. That question is really a historical and social one, about contact with Malay, Portuguese creole, Khoekhoe and Dutch dialects at the Cape, and it is not a question I can answer from a grammar book. I want to study Afrikaans at degree level because I want both halves: fluency good enough to read and argue in the language, and the linguistic and historical training to think seriously about how it came to exist and who has claimed it. I am also aware that Afrikaans carries a heavy political history, and that a large proportion of its speakers are coloured South Africans whose writing is often left out of the story my family told me. Reading Adam Small's poetry in translation alongside the original made me want to read the original properly. A course combining language acquisition with literature and sociolinguistics is exactly the shape of study I am looking for.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels give me a useful base. German has taught me how to learn a language systematically rather than by instinct: I keep a grammar notebook, drill verb patterns and read short news items daily, and I reached a point this year where I could follow a German podcast without subtitles. That habit transferred directly when I started teaching myself Afrikaans from a second-hand textbook and a bilingual children's Bible my mother still owns. History has trained me to handle sources that disagree; my coursework on Cold War propaganda made me careful about who is speaking and to whom, which matters enormously for a language whose standardisation was bound up with nationalist politics. English Literature has given me the vocabulary to write about texts closely, and my extended essay on dialect voice in Scottish fiction turned out to be surprisingly relevant preparation for thinking about non-standard varieties. I attended a free online lecture series on South African literature run by a public library and took notes on the Sestigers, which sent me to Brink and Breytenbach in translation. I know my Afrikaans is at a modest reading level and my speech is limited to household phrases, so I am applying to a course that will teach me the language properly from the ground up rather than assuming I already have it.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

For three days over the Easter holidays I shadowed staff in a university special collections library, arranged through my school's careers coordinator. My tasks were simple: numbering folders, checking item descriptions against a spreadsheet and flagging anything in an unexpected language. Two boxes of mid-century family correspondence included letters in Afrikaans, and although I was only an observer I was asked to note roughly what each one seemed to concern. I could manage dates, place names and greetings and almost nothing else, which was a plain and useful measure of how far I have to go. Watching an archivist explain why a misattributed letter mattered showed me that language skills are practically useful, not just personally satisfying. I volunteer on Saturdays in a charity shop, where I sort donations and serve customers, including a regular who speaks Dutch and lets me try out Afrikaans on him with patient corrections. I also help coach an under-13s netball team, which has made me better at explaining the same thing three different ways until it lands, a skill I expect to need when I am the one struggling in a seminar. At home I translate short recipe cards and letters my mother has kept, checking my attempts against her memory. She corrects my pronunciation constantly. I would like to reach the point where she cannot.

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