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Institute of Afrikaans Accent

Started by Beth Andrea, April 12, 2013, 08:47:14 PM

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Beth Andrea

While traipsing along the Interwebz in my jean pant, I came across this little ditty on how to speak wiff an Afrikaans accent...



...I think for most of us it is a futile effort to try and put this genie back in the bottle once she has tasted freedom...

--read in a Tessa James post 1/16/2017
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Beth Andrea

Now, I took a semester of German, and had a great time. I know it's related to Dutch, and that Dutch is a big part of the origins of Afrikaans...

The sound is totally interesting to me now. I'm gonna have to look into it more. Elements of 3 languages?! But not being fluent in any of them?

Sounds almost like the well-known Jack Daniels dialect here in the States...

...I think for most of us it is a futile effort to try and put this genie back in the bottle once she has tasted freedom...

--read in a Tessa James post 1/16/2017
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Blaine

Apparently I'm multitalented and I never knew it. The first video sounds like me when I'm talking to my dogs... Thank you for making me wet myselfs.
I did my waiting! Twelve years of it! In [my head!] Azkaban!
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FTMDiaries

Ag no, man - why dudn't ah see vis ffred?

Tawking wuff a Afrikaner eccent usn't thet hard. Just chaynze (they can't pronounce 'change') your vowels so they are lank low (turning all your 'i's into 'u's and 'a's into 'e's) and you'll have nah problems. Oh, and don't forget to rrroll your RRRs. ;)

Here are a few more Afrikanerisms & general South Africanisms:

  • Everyone is referred to as 'man' in casual conversation, irrespective of gender. So if I wanted to backchat my mother, I might say "Ag no, man, mom... why do I have to tidy my room?"
  • When I first moved to the UK I caused an uproar of hilarity in the office I worked at. This was in the days when computers still had floppy drives, although it was the smaller, harder disks in those days. When floppy disks first became popular, there were the large black ones that truly were floppy, and the smaller, harder ones that were more stiff. Well, South Africans called them 'floppies' and 'stiffies' respectively. That didn't happen in the UK... so when I moved to the UK I innocently asked a colleague whether I could borrow his stiffy... and everyone cracked up laughing. Because in the UK, a stiffy is something else entirely.  ;D
  • In Afrikaans, there's no such thing as a 'loaf of bread': they just call it 'a bread' ('n brood). So when they speak English, they'll say they're going to the cafe to buy a bread. ('Cafe' is the South African term for a corner shop) ;)
  • If someone were to threaten to throw something at you, in English we would say something like "I'm going to throw this thing at you!" but in Afrikaans they say "I'm going to throw you with this thing!" That led to a lot of humorous mental images when I was a kid, when a classmate would threaten to 'ffrow me wuff a chair". I'd imagine them trying to pick me up whilst I was sat in the chair so they could throw me across the room in it. ;)
  • If they want to know the time they'll ask "How late is it?" ("Hoe laat is dit?")... but if you answer that question, don't say something like "half-eleven" for 11:30. Because to them, "half-eleven" is halfway to, not past, 11, so to them it means 10:30. A lot of business meetings get missed because of that confusion.
  • Pretty much everyone in South Africa uses the Afrikaans 'ja' instead of 'yes'; and the word 'lekker' (meaning 'sweet' or 'nice') is very widely used too.
  • South Africans have something in common with Canadians - they say 'hey' a lot at the end of sentences. As in: "It's lekker to talk Afrikaans, hey?".
  • Don't even think of asking for 'trainers' or 'sneakers' in a shoe shop. They're takkies.
  • They can't seem to get their heads around the difference between 'borrow' and 'lend' (not that this is exclusive to South Africans, LOL) so everything becomes 'borrow', as in "borrow me your pen".
  • Oh, and one great thing that confused the living daylights out of my parents was the fact that South Africans call traffic lights 'robots'. So when asking for directions, you might be instructed to "go down the road for about 100 metres then hang a left at the robots". My folks got horrendously lost during their first drive in Jo'burg because they thought they were looking out for some giant robots at the side of the road or something. ;)





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Beth Andrea

Omg, some of that slang...hey, ken you borrow me your stiffie? LOL...

Some of the language miscommunication I totally unnerstant...when my chillin's was little, we use to call the TV remote a "phaser", a la Star Trek...well the kids would go to their fren's Haus and ask "where's your phaser?" Not knowing the actual word, they haf a heckuva time describing what they wanted...  ::)
...I think for most of us it is a futile effort to try and put this genie back in the bottle once she has tasted freedom...

--read in a Tessa James post 1/16/2017
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JessicaH

OMG, this is so funny since I have worked with South Africans ans spent a lot of time in South Africa in the last year. I have some of the most wonderful friends there now and I can't wait to go back!!!   You just have to watch for the "robots" when driving. :-)
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MaryT

My sound card doesn't work so I can't listen to the video. 

I do know that sex are what Sarf Efricans put potatoes in, though. 

My mother thought it was hilarious when South African children asked for arse cream.

The amusement is in both directions, though.  In Afrikaans, the letter "y" is pronounced "ay", as in "kyk", meaning "look".  An Afrikaans friend of my mother's thought it hilarious when her daughter said "Kyk Auntie D..." and my mother replied "I haven't any cake. You can have a biscuit."  Afrikaners typically call older friends "oom" (uncle) or "tante" (aunt) even if they are unrelated.

Many years ago, some Afrikaners with whom I was travelling, in what is now Namibia, asked me to translate the idiom "Ek sal 'n dooie hou kry as ek in die kooi klim."
I got it nearly right.  With some puzzlement, I translated it as "I shall get a death blow when I climb into the cow".  That's when I learned that there is a word "kooi", meaning "cot", which sounds the same as "koei", meaning "cow".  My companions found it so hilarious that they asked me to repeat it while one of them recorded it on a tape rcorder.

My mother was at first annoyed by South Africans saying that they would do something "just now" but not do it immediately.  She later understood that "just now" meant "soon" whereas "now now" meant "immediately".  It derives from the Afrikaans "net-nou" and "nou-nou".

It's usage diminished in later years but in the late 1960s, even English speaking South Africans used the archaic "bioscope" more frequently than "cinema".  That was probably because "bioskoop" was still the Afrikaans word for "cinema".

"Haai", pronounced "hi", is the Afrikaans word for "shark", so it is cruel to loudly greet people while bathing in the sea.

The Afrikaans word for "giraffe" is "kameelperd".  It literally transcribes as "camel horse" although "camelopard", an old word also meaning "giraffe", is said to derive from "camel leopard".  The Afrikaans word for "hippopotamus" is "seekoei", meaning "sea cow".  Place names with "tyger" or "tier" refer to leopards, although the modern Afrikaans is "luiperd".  Similarly, place names with "wolf" or "wolwe" refer to hyenas, although the modern Afrikaans is "hiĆ«na".

The word "trek", often used in English to mean travel in wild areas, is derived from the Afrikaans/South African Dutch word for "pull", via the usage of travelling with oxen pulling wagons.  Hence Star Trek, one of the most popular sci-fi series in history, has a title derived from Afrikaans.

While I was working as a programmer in Johannesburg, my boss and I, both born in England, were bemused when an Afrikaans colleague said of someone with bow legs that "he couldn't catch a pick between his legs".  "Pardon?" my boss and I asked simultaneously.  Our colleague explained that there was a game in which young farmers would try to catch picks between their legs.  My boss was horrified and said that no farmer had better throw a pick at him.  After much puzzlement on both sides, it turned out that the farmers' game involved catching PIGS between their legs.

In Kipling's Just So Stories there is The Elephant's Child.  I suspect that the name derives from the Afrikaans custom of explaining nature lore to the uninitiated by, e.g., saying "olifant se kind" (elephant's child) when they could have simply said "olifant" (elephant).  Similarly for "leeu se kind" (lion's child).  They are not necessarily referring to baby animals.

Afrikaans has a  considerable pedagogic advantage over English in that there are negligible exceptions when it comes to pronunciation.  In 1979, while I was working in the paving industry, a very intelligent but illiterate Shangaan man asked me to teach him how to read.  Typically, though illiterate, he could hardly be described as uneducated.  He knew much more about European cultures than most South Africans of European descent knew about indigenous African cultures.  He was also fluent in English, Afrikaans, Portuguese, Tsonga, Zulu, Xhosa, Fanagalo, Sotho and Tswana, although he could read or write in none of them.  Although I am an English speaker, the idea of teaching someone English, with all of its exceptions, was daunting to me.  Fanagalo and Afrikaans were the only other languages that I shared with my would-be pupil.  Fanagalo was mostly used for communicating with manual workers, whereas books, magazines and newspapers were printed in Afrikaans.  I discussed the matter with my pupil and he decided that he would rather learn to read Afrikaans over a short time than English over a long time.  If he could read Afrikaans, he would be in a better position to learn to read other languages.

My student's rapid progress no doubt had more to do with his intelligence than my teaching ablity.  Within a few days, just by taking a few minutes now and again to learn the alphabet in Afrikaans, which I drew for him in the soil, he had memorised the letters by both name and usage.  I then introduced him to short words in an Afrikaans newspaper.  I will always remember the look on his face when he recognised his first word.  After some time, he stopped coming to work.  I hope that he went on to better things.

Afrikaans has, not without justification, an association with racism and apartheid.  However, I prefer to remember something I saw in 1968 when my family lived in Natal.  We had no adjacent neighbours but one day, a large Zulu family in traditional dress arrived at the home of an Afrikaans family who lived nearby.  I watched as they were welcomed into the house.  The Afrikaans family's youngest son later explained to me that his father had befriended a Zulu man and had  invited him to visit with his family.  The Zulu man decided that it was an opportunity for a meeting of cultures, hence the traditional clothes.  The son showed me a Zulu spear, beautifully decorated with beads (and with a safe wooden rather than metal point) that he had been brought as a gift.

I can't listen to it myself but anyone interested in South African English vocabulary and pronunciation might like

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hr75pqA8bo

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