It is unlikely that Standard Afrikaans has been based on one relatively uniform vernacular. Ana Deumert has convincingly argued that what we recognise as Standard Afrikaans today is a construction to be attributed to language entrepreneurs who strove for a unique South African identity towards the end of the nineteenth and early 20th century. This led to deliberately discarding some of the then metropolitan Dutch linguistic norms. The Afrikaans negative and diminutive systems will be shown to be the linguistic outcome of these conceptions of identity and purity.