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In reply to the discussion: Casual marijuana use linked to brain changes [View all]FarrenH
(768 posts)It's the second most widely spoken (second) language after Zulu thanks to it being imposed on Blacks and English-speaking whites under Apartheid in the government and education spheres. A majority of Coloureds in the Western half of the country (the term doesn't have the connotations it does over there - with very few American-inspired political exceptions my Coloured friends self-identify as Coloured) speak it as a home language too. English is also ubiquitous as a second language and is the de facto lingua franca of politics and business. Afrikaans, especially spoken Afrikaans, is very mutually intelligible with Dutch, but there are signficant differences from the Malay, Scots, German, Khoisan, Nguni and other influences on the language. In fact it saw it's genesis in the interaction between Malay slaves and Dutch slaveholders (which also produced the distinct "Cape Coloured" community, of Bantu-Malay-European-Khoisan descent) and, although it's disputed, the oldest Afrikaans book is thought to be an Afrikaans Koran.
I must admit to overwhelming bias where cannabis is concerned because I've been an analyst/developer most of my life and smoked it on and off for a large part of my adulthood. I'm not smoking it right now because it does have effects on motivation and energy levels and I'm working on fairly sophisticated stuff (neural nets for work, ontological processing as a hobby project) but I've always thought of it as a much milder alternative to alcohol and occasionally actually positive for self-medication (sleeplessness, poor appetite and pain). Also just about everyone I grew up with has or does use it recreationally - engineers working on cybernetics, CEOs and directors, programmers and even one particle physicist I used to know. So tenuous claims from studies like these conflict violently with my experience. But the caution to check your biases is always welcome.