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= The First Kaaps Dictionary = The first Dictionary in Kaaps was published in Cape Town, South Africa in 2021. This dictionary is trilingual and contains Kaaps, Afrikaans and English. The Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps was launched through a collective effort by academic and community stakeholders; the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities research at the University of the Western Cape in partnership with an NGO Heal the Hood Project. This project was funded by the Center for Race, Ethnicity and Language at Stanford University, along with Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport. The Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps has four goals. They aim to increase awareness and knowledge on the history and roots of Kaaps, to contribute to debates around unifying the writing systems of Kaaps, to document the use of Kaaps on different platforms and lastly, to describe the lived linguistic experiences of Kaaps speakers.

The speakers of Kaaps
The existence of Kaaps predates that of standard Afrikaans and can be traced back to encounters between indigenous African Khoi and San and slaves in what was known as the Cape Dutch Colony, from as early as the 1700's. Kaaps is mostly spoken by the working class, Coloured community in the Cape Flats. Today Kaaps is a marginalized language as it was perceived as a colloquial version of standard Afrikaans during the Apartheids era in South Africa, a perception that persists in Democratic South Africa. Afrikaans was appropriated by white colonialists and standard ,Afrikaans was established and developed as a form of resistance against hegemonic English. Furthermore, it was developed to create a collective racial identity of ordinary white Afrikaner people thereby separating them from the working-class, Kaaps speaking Coloured community. Kaaps is viewed as a subpar, impure or mixed language; consisting of mainly Afrikaans and English languages thrown together. This influenced how the social identities of coloured people are viewed, thus implying that Black and White identities are pure and bounded while Coloured identities were not. The speakers of Kaaps are often linked to a low social-order, comicality, stupidity and the despised language variety.

It is thus the aim of projects like The Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps to destigmatize the Kaaps language and to encourage its speakers to take back their dignity and agency. By publishing a dictionary in Kaaps, it might encourage the view of Kaaps as an African langauge like the other African dialects. Empowering Kaaps would thus empower the speakers of this language.