system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:Why is Afrikaans significantly distinct from Dutch, but American and British English are so similar considering the similar timelines of the establishment of colonies in the two regions?
gpt
Well, Afrikaans and Dutch are actually very closely related, and there is a high degree of mutual intelligiblity -- so much, in fact, that before WW2 Afrikaans was officially classified as a dialect of Dutch. Dutch speakers find Afrikaans relatively easy to understand; Afrikaans speakers have a little more trouble with Dutch because since the languages separated, Dutch has imported or invented a lot of new words that Afrikaans didn't. One South African writer reckoned that the differences between Afrikaans and Dutch are about the same as the differences between Received Pronunciation -- the "posh" British dialect you might hear on the BBC -- and the English spoken in the American Deep South.

One of the main reasons Afrikaans is quite as distinctive as it is is that it was influenced by other languages that the Dutch spoken in Europe didn't come into contact with: Malay, Portuguese, South African English and some Bantu languages. This mostly affected the grammar, though -- Afrikaans didn't import many words from these languages.