Is Dutch and Afrikaans comparable to an English based Pidgin and English? How much does the lack of case and gender disturb or irritate Dutch speakers?

Answer 1

As a native speaker of Dutch and English, in a sense it is. Afrikaans is a lot like informal Dutch, so while it would still be mutually inteligable (in a sense) it is quite awkward to say certain phrases and sometimes it would irk a native Dutch speaker because it is so familiar yet so different at the same time. It would definitely take some time for a Dutch person to grasp the full meaning of a sentence but with revision a Dutch speaker definitely would be able to understand the meaning. For example, in Afrikaans "the boy walks to the store" would be "die seun stap na die winkel". In Dutch, the sentence would rather be written as "de jongen loopt naar de winkel (toe)". So while I would definitely understand the Afrikaans version, it simply is a little awkward. For example, seun has the phonetic meaning of zoon (son) in Dutch but the semantic meaning of jongen (boy). I hope this helps.