I was listening to a Dutch guy speaking English earlier today, and I noticed quite a few similarities to what I hear in South African English. Not completely the same, but a few pronunciations here and there.
Did I imagine this, or is it understood that the South African English accent has distinct Dutch (or Afrikaans) influences?
And yeah, I know there is not just one SA accent, and I suspect that in Afrikaans speaking areas it might be more pronounced, but I’m thinking more about “standard” SA accent that one would hear in a city like Johannesburg.
To me, the SA accent sounds similar to an Australian or NZ accent, but definitely different enough to be noticeable.
When I hear Dutch or Flemish, it sounds very much like English. When I hear Afrikaans, it doesn’t sound like English. The last time I was in South Africa (last month!) I asked a Belgian guy (Dutch/Flemish speaker) about how good his Afrikaans was. He said it mostly was a matter of changing his accent and using some different vocabulary. He also implied that most Afrikaans speakers can understand Dutch, but that most Dutch speakers generally don’t understand Afrikaans unless the Afrikaans change their accent – kind of like an American faking an Aussie accent. I’m not sure how much of this is true; I’m only repeating what a Belgian guy told me, and he was angry when I first though he was French-Belgian.
It so happens that when I’m in South Africa, I work with a lot of bona fide Australians. On the surface, maybe you might confuse South African English for Australian, but side-by-side, the accents are completely distinguishable for native English speakers. Of course native Afrikaans speakers have a noticeably Afrikaans accent, which is distinct from the South African English accent.
I think there are too many South African accents to generalize. I was there this summer, and the accents I was hearing ran the gamut from a nice lilt to completely unintelligible.
The “Afrikaans SA English” accents do, the “English SA English” accent doesn’t.
Jo’burg’s a melting pot and also highly stratified. There’s no “standard” Jo’burg accent, and the most common one really isn’t that “ASAE” accent, it’s much more English than that. You’d have better luck outside the city, in the Rands or further.
It sounds nothing like that to us. Although we also have difficulty telling NZ from Oz…
The accent I think you’re thinking of does have a slight Afrikaans influence, especially with regard to certain sounds like R and vowels. Also the way the “th” in “with” if pronounced “wiff” - Would Wikus Van De Merwe be a good example of what you mean?
Just FYI, Sharlo Copley’s natural accentis much more what I consider the “standard” South African one, as in, the one I expect from an English newsreader. Or should I say, the standard White one. The standard Black English accent is very different.
Sometimes the blacks at my company will ask me something like, “Why you don’t understand me? Is it because I’m African?” I’ll usually retort with something like, “Well, yeah, but to be fair, I don’t understand the Afrikaners, either.”
That makes me wonder, do they have trouble understanding my accent?
I don’t know, where are you from? Generally, South Africans are exposed to a lot of foreign accents because of where our entertainment is sourced from, but some (Middle American, RP English) a lot more than others, of course.
Good point. American. Probably more used to me than I am them. I’ve got to remember to not remember your words and just use mine. Robots and bakkies, indeed.
I think I’d partly disagree with that, in that there are definitely some “English SA English” accents which are noticeably Afrikaans-influenced. I agree that Sharlto Copley in that second video is a pretty standard example of the WUESA* accent, and some traits of his speech suggest Afrikaans influence to me.
When foreigners speak of “the South African accent”, it’s equally possible that they’re thinking of English-as-spoken-by-Afrikaners, given that there are almost twice as many Afrikaners as English-speakers. (And of course the majority of people speaking English in South Africa are people whose home language is an African language, but their accent(s) have less international exposure.)
*White Urban English-speaking South African; though these days the accent is not so restricted to whites.
Of course that makes senses. The first part, I mean.
The audio level is too low in that snip for me to detect the finer points of the accent. My main source of hearing SA accents is Ernie Els and Retif Goosen. You’re probably going to tell me they have different accents.
I’m afraid so. Both are “ASAE” accents, but Els’s is much, much more so. Goosen has what I consider an more “English” Afrikaans accent, the kind that often comes about because an Afrikaans kid has one English parent, or went to an English school, or the like. Els’s OTOH is untinged.
Mmh, I just listened to it again, and there’s definitely something that pings as Afrikaans-influenced to me (I mean, obviously, outside the part where he’s deliberately doing an Afrikaans accent when they’re talking about the iPhone). But it’s very difficult to really pin down what it is, so what influences there may be are certainly subtle.
There definitely are English SA’ns whose accents have an Afrikaans influence, though it’s difficult to draw the line where English SA’n stops and Afrikaner begins (as in the case you mention of an Afrikaans kid with an English parent or vice versa).
All I know about the differences between internal SA accents is that Graeme Smith has a recognizably different accent from Johan Botha. And what the he’ll is Kepler Wessels accent?
