Friday, December 22, 2006

South African English is lekker!

http://www.southafrica.info/plan_trip/travel_tips/questions/saenglish.htm


South Africans speak English, that doesn't mean you'll always understand us. Our robots are nothing like R2D2, just now doesn't mean immediately, and babbelas is not a shampoo.
SA English has a flavour all its own, borrowing freely from Afrikaans - which is similar to Dutch and Flemish - as well as from the country's many African languages, with some words coming from colonial-era Malay and Portuguese immigrants.
Note: In many words derived from Afrikaans, the letter "g" is pronounced in the same way as the "ch" in the Scottish "loch" or the German "achtung" - a kind of growl at the back of the throat. In the pronunciation guides below, the spelling for this sound is given as "gh".
A / B / C / D / E / F / G / H / I / J / K / L / M / N / O / P / R / S / T / U / V / W


witblitz (vit-blitz) - Potent home-made distilled alcohol, much like the American moonshine. The word means "white lightning" in Afrikaans. See mampoer.

read more online at http://www.southafrica.info/plan_trip/travel_tips/questions/saenglish.htm

SouthAfrica.info reporter. Additional information sourced from Wiktionary, Wikipedia and the Rhodes University Dictionary Unit for SA English.

No comments: