M.A. (Afrikaans) / The purpose of this dissertation is to give a Iinguistic and sociolinguistic description of the Afrikaans spoken in the Argentine, henceforth AFR A. The study was undertaken to complement the numerous studies already done of local varieties of Afrikaans as well as the brief study of Strydom (1963) of the Afrikaans spoken by the Angolan "trekkers" who left South Africa before the standardization of Afrikaans. In this study the typologies for the classification of language classification are refined to faciIitate the linguistic classification of AFR A. A group of South Africans left South Africa to settle in the Argentine at the turn of the century. Initially conditions were very severe and the" settlers kept themselyes isolated from the Spanish community. Gradual acculturation resulted in the replacement of AFR A by Spanish, a process that has not been completed yet. To investigate this atrophying linguistic form, sociolinguistic fieldwork based on the work of Haugen (1972), Labov (1972) and Milroy (1980) was undertaken. Data in the form of phonetic transcriptions and tape-recordings was collected during March and ApriI 1986 while a social network was built up. The data was sorted and interpreted after repeated replaying and phonetic transcriptions of the recordings under supervision of the supervisors. Linguistically AFR A can be regarded as an unstable variety of Afrikaans. Variation of vowels and consonants in AFR A are often encountered in dialectal forms of Afrikaans. The influence of Spanish is evident in the vocabulary of AFR A, particularly in the formation of verbs that. are Africanerisms of Spanish infinitive verbs. Hybrids and loanwords in AFR A occur in particular vocabulary domains namely plant and animal life, topography, transport and communication, illness and domestic and civic affairs. The vocabulary of AFR A is, however, an impoverished vocabulary which cannot be used for scientific and abstract discussion. semantically AFR A differs from Afrikaans in that approximately thirty-five words that are used in Afrikaans are used in different contexts in AFR A. Beside numerous expressions that are unique to AFR A, the syntactic markers of AFR A are the over-generalization of ge- as past participle, pronominal repetition and the use of Spanish conjunctions. To classify AFR A Iinguistically existing typologies were refined to facilitate the distinction between different varieties of language on the basis of relevant sociolinguistic parameters. These parameters are represented in pseudo-mathematical form in a formula by which a variety of a language can be classified linguistically. AFR A is classified as an atrophying variety of Afrikaans.