Things to know about Afrikaans
Afrikaans is spoken in South Africa by the descendants of white, non-English-speaking settlers and also by the indigenous peoples for whom it was the language of instruction. The language is principally derived from Dutch dialects that evolved in the various parts of South Africa. In 1925, it replaced Dutch as one of the official languages of South Africa.
Typing Afrikaans Characters
Afrikaans is written in a variation of the Latin alphabet but uses characters with diacritic marks to indicate various aspects of pronunciation. There are two methods for typing these characters.
The simplest method is to use the character suggestions. To do so, type the base character for the letter you want, then select the special character from the set of characters which appears.
The other method is to use the virtual keyboard with the layout set to Afrikaans. (If necessary, you can change the layout by clicking 
and selecting an option in the Keyboard Language menu.)
Locate the character you want on the virtual keyboard, then click on it or press the corresponding key on your physical keyboard. Capital letters and certain punctuation marks, such as the question mark, are available by holding down the Shift key. Some of the special characters for Afrikaans are available by holding down the Ctrl and Alt keys at the same time.
See Typing Accents and Special Characters for details on both typing methods.