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So widely in fact has this dialect separated itself from Dutch that the Boer boy at the Cape working for an examination finds it as hard to pass in literary Dutch as in English or French, and it not infrequently occurs that the Boer boy is plucked in Dutch who passes in all other subjects. Between the language of the Camera Obscura and the Paarl's Patriot there is hardly more affinity than between the old Saxon of Alfred's day and the slang of a modern London street boy.[19]

In answer to the question, "How did this little speech arise?" it is sometimes suggested that the original soldiers and sailors who founded the settlement being largely Frisian and wholly uneducated, never spoke Dutch at all, but a dialect; and that, being mainly uncultured persons, and using no literature, their speech easily underwent further disintegration. On the other hand, it has been said that the Taal has been formed by the intercourse between the Dutchman and his slaves, and the aboriginal races of the country; that these people, obliged to use an imperfect Dutch, taught their broken lingo to their masters' children, which has so become the language of the Boer.