| December 27, 2008 |
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I say tomato and you say to-may-to – all cool in SA
LISTENING to a foreign national trying to do a South African accent is a lot like hearing recordings of your own voice. You know you don‘t sound like that to other people, but then, you‘re faced with firm evidence that you do ... “Whaarrr jooo kip lorfing it meee?” “Bikooz yew torque sow funny!” And that‘s just the first-language, white English male from the Eastern Cape accent. By my calculation, there are about ten first-language English accents alive in SA. East Rand, West Rand, Joburg South, Sandton, KZN, Eastern Cape, Cape Town, the surfers‘ dialect, the accent of the hip-hop fan who went to a model C school, second- generation Ashkenazi Jewish female schooled at Rodean, ... okay, there are a lot more than 10. Let‘s say there are 35. And let‘s assume that for every one of South Africa‘s 11 official languages there are 35 accents. And let‘s also assume that everyone‘s first-language dialect would mean they‘ll have a unique, distinctive accent when they attempt a new language. According to this model, there are 35x11x11= 4235 possible accents in South Africa. What about the white Zimbabwean expat, schooled at Prince Edward, who fought in the bush war, but speaks Shona like it was his mother tongue, who moved to Durban, where he learnt to surf before marrying an Indian woman. You know how those guys speak English. Well, that guy, to be precise. If you break it down, each of us has a unique accent, one forged in the furnace of our life experience. And only we can do our own accent properly. And I wouldn‘t have it any other way. The outrageous diversity of our 4000 accents works perfectly for us and no one should be allowed to change that. If we can communicate and still imbue our transmissions with the unique stamp of our personality, society is all the richer. So down with prescriptivist pronunciation nazis. Down! No one has the right to tell anybody else how to pronounce their words. Such behaviour is a legacy of colonialism, elitism and every other -ism that supposes that one bunch of people can be better than another because of where they went to school. Traditionally, the preferred style of pronunciation tended to be the accent of the people in power, which is why the Oxford English pronunciation ruled the British Empire for a couple of hundred years. So, to Confused of Bryanston, who takes umbrage at the fact that the SABC newsreader‘s “birdie” sounds like “baddie”, If you can‘t tell the difference, you don‘t belong here. And if we were going to have one dominant accent in South Africa it certainly wouldn‘t be the English private school accent, would it? Of course not, it would be the accent of the 66-year-old Zululand freedom-fighter with a standard-three education, ten years in Robben Island, 15 years in exile and the common touch with the electorate. If you can credibly pull off an accent like that, you should do well. Vive la difference!
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hollandsb@avusa.co.za... |
