Raising Bilingual Afrikaans-English Children in Canada

Will your children lose their Afrikaans? Not automatically — but it isn’t automatically preserved either. It fades by default if nothing deliberate happens at home, and it holds with a surprisingly small, consistent effort. That’s the honest short answer before we get into the myth.

The myth: you need a real community for it to work

The instinct makes sense. In South Africa, Afrikaans surrounds a child constantly — school, television, the corner shop. The assumption people carry into raising bilingual Afrikaans-English children in Canada is that without that same ambient exposure, the effort is basically doomed.

Here’s the reality check on the community side: the 2021 Census recorded 12,270 people in Canada with Afrikaans as their mother tongue. That’s a genuinely small, dispersed number next to the Afrikaans-speaking populations in the UK, Australia or New Zealand — you’re very unlikely to land somewhere with an Afrikaans school, an Afrikaans church congregation down the road, or a critical mass of Afrikaans-speaking neighbours. That part of the worry is fair.

But the myth is in the conclusion, not the premise. A language doesn’t need a surrounding community to survive in a child — it needs a reliable adult who speaks it to them consistently. Community makes it easier and more textured. It was never the mechanism doing the actual work; the home was.

What that means in practice

Without the community backdrop, teaching Afrikaans to children overseas comes down to a handful of unglamorous habits repeated for years: one parent (or both) speaking Afrikaans at home consistently, rather than only when it’s convenient. Afrikaans media — books, shows, music — kept in rotation rather than defaulting entirely to English once school starts. And, where there’s simply no local option, Afrikaans lessons online for expat children have become a reasonably common substitute for the classroom exposure that used to happen by default.

The stage where they push back

This will probably happen, usually somewhere between ages six and twelve, when English becomes the language of friendship, school and status, and Afrikaans starts to feel like homework. It’s rarely rejection of you or of South Africa; it’s a child optimising for the language that gets them the most social traction, which is a completely normal thing for a child to do. The parents who keep the language alive through this stretch are generally the ones who hold firm on the home rule without turning it into a fight: you can still speak English to your friends; you speak Afrikaans to me.

The realistic expectation

Fluent-and-fluent, indistinguishable from a child raised in Cape Town, is the ambitious outcome and not guaranteed. Understanding it, speaking it with an accent, being able to have a real conversation with an Ouma over video call — that’s the far more common, and still genuinely valuable, result of sustained effort without a community behind it.

If you’re weighing this alongside the wider decision to move at all, it’s worth naming plainly: staying in South Africa, where the language question doesn’t arise in the first place, remains a legitimate choice too — this isn’t a problem every family needs to solve.

Cape2Canada’s blog covers more of the day-to-day settling-in questions that don’t fit neatly into an official checklist, including this one.