The Assumptions Afrikaans Speakers Make in Canada

You’re filling in a government form, and it offers you a choice: English or French. You pause for half a second before remembering, obviously, that Afrikaans was never going to be the third option. It’s a small moment, and it repeats itself for a while in different forms — a reminder that Canada’s bilingualism is a specific, official one, and it isn’t about you.

There are a handful of predictable assumptions Afrikaans speakers living in Canada tend to make early on. Here’s where they usually go wrong.

Mistake one: expecting “bilingual country” to mean flexibility for you

Canada’s English-French bilingualism is a constitutional and administrative fact, built for its own history — it isn’t a general openness to non-official languages that somehow extends a little goodwill your way. Government services, forms and courts run in English or French. Afrikaans sits entirely outside that structure, exactly like every other language that isn’t one of the two official ones. This isn’t a slight; it’s just worth knowing so it doesn’t land as a surprise.

Mistake two: assuming community will happen on its own

This is the big one, and it’s grounded in an actual number: the 2021 Census recorded only 12,270 people across the entire country reporting Afrikaans as their mother tongue — small and genuinely dispersed compared with the Afrikaans-speaking populations you’d find in the UK, Australia or New Zealand. In South Africa, Afrikaans-speaking community is ambient; you don’t have to build it. In Canada, in most places, you do. People who wait for it to appear organically tend to wait a long time.

Mistake three: treating isolation as a permanent verdict

Small and dispersed doesn’t mean nonexistent. It means finding other Afrikaans speakers in Canada is an active job rather than a passive one — online groups, South African social networks in your specific city, church congregations with SA members even where the service itself isn’t in Afrikaans. It’s a real, common experience here: keeping your mother tongue without a community around you is manageable, but it requires treating it as a project rather than something that will simply materialise.

Mistake four: over-correcting by trying to recreate home exactly

The opposite failure mode also shows up — throwing significant energy into replicating a South African social world in miniature, and feeling like a failure when Canada, quite reasonably, doesn’t offer the raw material for that at scale. The people who settle in most comfortably tend to hold both things at once: genuine effort to keep the language and the culture alive, alongside genuine openness to the very different social world actually available to them.

The one thing worth sitting with

None of this is really about language mechanics. It’s about grief for an ambient, unearned kind of belonging that doesn’t automatically exist somewhere new — and that’s worth naming honestly rather than pretending the adjustment is purely logistical. Some people decide, reasonably, that this particular loss isn’t one they want to take on, and staying in South Africa remains a completely legitimate choice on that basis alone.

Cape2Canada’s blog covers more of the emotional and day-to-day side of settling in, beyond the paperwork.