Africander, Afrikander, Africaner, and Afrikaner are variant spellings (the last of which is preferred) of the name given white South Africans of Dutch ancestry (also called Boers); it was once generally (but is now infrequently) applied to white South Africans of any European ancestry. Afrikaans, which developed from seventeenth-century Dutch, is the language of the Afrikaners.
