Cooljugator: The Smart Conjugator in Afrikaans

This is a very simple Afrikaans verb conjugator. Our goal is to make Afrikaans conjugation easy, smart and straightforward.

You can input verbs into the Cooljugator bar above in any form, tense or mood in both Afrikaans and English. The Afrikaans Cooljugator can currently do around 215 verbs. We suggest you try it out.

You can also click here to browse the list of Afrikaans verbs that we can conjugate.

Common Afrikaans verbs

If you run out of ideas, some Afrikaans verbs according to their frequency of use on Cooljugator are:

The Afrikaans language

Afrikaans is an Indo-European West Germanic language (closely related to Dutch, out of which it developed, English, Frisian and others), spoken by close to 10 million people mainly in South Africa and Namibia. It also has nearly 20 million speakers of it is a second language. Over 90% of Afrikaans' vocabulary is of Dutch origin, but it has adopted words from many other different languages, including Malay, the Khoisan languages, Bantu, and Portuguese.

Since Afrikaans shares its history with Dutch, it is worth reading up on Dutchto learn about the early development of Afrikaans. Afrikaans came about as, in the seventeeth century, under Jan van Riebeeck, Dutch colonised South Africa. It is not exactly clear how the language started, but it is commonly held that it was created by Dutch colonists trying to speak to the Malay slaves they had brought in their colonies. Malays could not speek Dutch, so they simplified the language and started using their own words, such as 'piesang' (the Afrikaans word for 'banana', compare with 'banaan' in Dutch). Later, during the spread of Afrikaans, it was influenced by the nearby Kohisan and Bantu languages.

Afrikaans is a very interesting language and very worth looking into: it has an extra negativity marker at the end of sentences ('ek wil nie Afrikaans praat nie' - 'I do not want to speak Afrikaans'), a lack of grammatical gender, largely regular conjugation (yay for us!) and many other interesting grammatical features.

About Afrikaans conjugation

Afrikaans conjugation is a process by which Afrikaans verbs are modified to accord with various other features of the phrase.

In Afrikaans, you can conjugate verbs by these major factors:

• tense - Afrikaans has only three tenses: present ('ek maak'), past ('ek het gemaak') and future ('ek sal maak'); preterite past forms do exist for some verbs ('ek wis' - 'I knew'), but they are very rare, and always there is a simple past version with the same meaning;
• mood - mood indicates the attitude of the speaker, and is distinguished as indicative ('ek wil' - 'I go'), imperative ('noem!' - 'name!'), conditional ('sou noem' - 'would name');
• aspect - aspect connects Afrikaans verbs to the flow of time, for example, you can have the perfect tense 'sal gehelp het' - 'will have helped', which is different from saying 'sal help' - 'will help';
• voice - Afrikaans has an impersonal passive voice (the humonguous difference between 'I eat' and 'I am eaten'); for example, 'die seun skop die bal' ('the son is kicking the ball') - 'die bal word deur die seun geskop' (the ball is being kicked by the son').

In the Afrikaans Cooljugator, we try to provide you as many of these conjugation factors as possible, although we also try to focus on the most important parts of conjugation too. Our Afrikaans Cooljugator is still under development and more verbs will be added in the future. If you would like to see it expanded, get in touch to let us know so we prioritise it! And if you’d like to help up with it, get in touch too!