South African English
South African English is a dialect of English spoken in South Africa and to some extent, in neighbouring countries with a large number of Anglo-Africans living in them, such as Namibia and Zimbabwe.
South African English is not unified in its pronunciation: this can be attributed to the fact that English is the mother tongue for only 40% of the white inhabitants (the remainder mostly having Afrikaans as their mother tongue) and only a tiny minority of black inhabitants of the region. The dialect can be, however, identified by many loanwords mostly from Afrikaans but increasingly also from Zulu and other African languages. Some of these words, like "trek", have seeped into general English usage.
Traditionally, white South Africans have spoken South African English, but a distinct Indian South African form of English has long existed, and an equally distinctive black South African English is developing very rapidly. Convergence between these sub-dialects can be observed but it is a slow process.
The convergence process was exposed to a humorous treatment by Robin Malan in his book 'Ah Big Yaws' written in the mid 1970's. The book is concise, and conforms more or less to the spoken dialect of Cape Town in 1974-1976, in the northern Cape Town suburbs of Bellville and Durbanville, where Malan resided, and in the University town of Stellenbosch, where he was at the time a lecturer of spoken English. This book is often considered a high point of South African written wit, and a low point for South African linguistics, although it is now considered an important cultural time-capsule, as it also gives a pocket outline of white South Africa immediately before the social and political chaos of the 1980's.
The fourth edition of the Dictionary of South African English was released in 1991.
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2 Vocabulary 3 Idioms 4 English Academy of Southern Africa 5 External links |
Pronunciation
- Main article: phonemic differentiation.
The most noticeable difference in pronunciation is probably the flat "i", so that "six" is pronounced in a way sounding like "sucks", and "today" like "to die". This is a part of the vowel shift that has occurred in South Africa as well as New Zealand.
- pan = /pɛn/
- pen = /pen/
- pin = /pɨn/
- pun = /pan/
- New Zealand: pahk the kah dehwn tehwn
- South Africa: pawk the kaw dahwn tahwn
- work → weck
- win → ween
- car → kah
- book → boook
- dirty → detty
- garden → gaddin
- fast → fust
- town → taun
- broken → braucken
Vocabulary
- Main article: List of lexical differences in South African English
Idioms
The influence of Afrikaans accounts for many idioms in South African English. Probably the most distinctive example is the use of the Afrikaans word "ja" ("a" as in "father") as a contraction of "yes" as opposed to the word "yeah" used by British, North American and Australian English speakers. (eg: "Do you want to go to a movie?" "Ja, sure")
Other idiomatic phrases influenced or taken from Afrikaans include "are you coming with?" ("are you coming with us?"), the use of "hey" at the end of a sentence (though mainly used in Gauteng province) eg: "I don't really know, hey", "she'll be here just now" instead of "she'll be here soon", "ja well, no fine" instead of "things are okay, so-so", and "hey bru. You know who I am?" instead of "excuse me but what do you think you're doing?".
Another influence is the use of the word 'comma' as in decimal comma, instead of 'point' as in decimal point. For example, a South African radio broadcaster would say "the rand closed at 7,25 [seven comma two five] against the US dollar" instead of "the rand closed at 7.25 [seven point two five] against the US dollar."
Speakers of African languages may confuse 'he', 'she' and 'it', as the third person singular is often the same. "Madam is not here. He is in England." and "Shees braucken, shees not wekking."
