South African Accent

What about moving to Africa? It's a beautiful continent. I've decided to continue my research and... Here we go, with South African English.

In some way, South African English is similar to Australian English because of social variation within it has been classified. As we can see, there are three main categories:  Cultivated, closely approximating RP and associated with upper class; General, a social indicator of the middle class, and Broad, associated with the working class and/or Afrikaans descent, and closely approximating the second-language Afrikaans-English variety.

English has been both a highly influential language in South Africa, and a language influenced, in turn, by adaptation in the country's different communities. Estimates based on the 1991 census suggest that some 45% of the population have a speaking knowledge of English.

The term South African English is applied to the first-language dialects of English spoken by South Africans also spoken by Zimbabweans, Zambians and Namibians being recognized as offshoots.

Today, English is the country's lingua franca, and the primary language of government, business, and commerce. It is a compulsory subject in all schools, and the medium of instruction in most schools and tertiary institutions.

According to the 2001 census, English is spoken as a home language by 8.2% of the population (3 673 206 people) one in three of whom are not white. South Africa's Asian people, most of whom are Indian in origin, are largely English-speaking, although many also retain their languages of origin. There is also a significant group of Chinese South Africans, also largely English-speaking but who also retain their languages of origin as well.

South African English is an established and unique dialect, with strong influences from Afrikaans and the country's many African languages. For example: "The old lady has been tuning me grief all avie, coz I bust her tjor going yooees with the okes in Bez Valley" would translate as: "My mother has been shouting at me all afternoon because I crashed her car doing U-turns with my friends in Bez Valley."

As a home language, English is most common in KwaZulu-Natal, where over a third of all English-speaking South Africans are found. Another third of English speakers live in Gauteng, where it is the language of 12.5% of the population, and 23.8% in the Western Cape, where it is spoken by 19.3% of the population.

Important numbers, uh? Now, let’s see something about pronunciation.

We have got to distinguish the so-called "Conservative South African" (close to RP) and "Respectable South African" from a broad "Extreme South African". They are all said to be non-rhotic.

Not only words, also a lot of SAE phonetic peculiarities are derived from Afrikaans: Unlike Southern English dialects and Broad Australian no h-dropping occurs; instead, the [h] may be used in its voiced variety. Before a fricative, in a vowel-plus-nasal consonant combination, the vowel will be nasalized. SAE r tends to be a flap rather than an approximant, if linked to another consonant. This is typical for U-RP too, but is probably rather due to Afrikaans influence here. In Extreme South African, voiceless plosives are unaspirated. The diphthong [Ɛɪ] becomes [əi].

South African English has a total of 29 different vowels. For all except lax vowels, a longer duration counterpart is included; for example, for the phone [i] in the Afrikaans word siek (‘ill’), there is a phone [i..], as found in vier (‘four’). Both lax and tense vowels are included in the phone set because lax vowels occur frequently in English, but not at all in Afrikaans or the African languages. Lax vowels in English are typically shorter, lower and slightly more centralized than the corresponding tense vowels. Examples are found in the words ‘him’ and ‘put’. Let’s see this scheme:

                                                       

We can explain some examples of difference between vowels.

/ɪ/ as in kit is split between the realizations [ɪ] and [ɪ̈] in General, and [i] and [ɪ̈~ə] in Broad. The split is an allophonic variation, with the fronter realization occurring near velar and palatal consonants, and the more central one occurring elsewhere. Cultivated SAE lacks this split, but this feature regarding /ɪ/ is a reliable sociolinguistic marker for South African English in general. Before [ɫ], the vowel may be further back [ɯ̈].

/ɛ/ as in dress is usually realized as [e], though it is lower ([ɛ]) in Broad, sometimes approaching [æ], especially before [ɫ]. Some varieties of Broad and General SAE place this vowel higher, around raised [e] or lowered [ɪ].

A slightly raised [æ] is the usual realization for /æ/ (as in trap) in Cultivated and General. In Broad varieties, it is often raised to [ɛ], so that /æ/ encroaches on /ɛ/ for some speakers. A good example of this is South Africa sounds more like South Efrica.

/ɒ/ (as in lot) ranges from [ɒ̈] to [ɔ] notes a tendency towards [ʌ̈] in younger Cape Town and Natal speakers of General SAE.

/ʌ/ (as in strut) typically ranges from a low to mid centralised vowel ([ä] to [ɐ]) in SAE.

A total of 30 unique diphthongs has been identified. The English and Afrikaans diphthongs are similar, but no diphthongs are shared between the two languages, mainly due to the use of lax vowels in English. In the African languages, diphthongs occur only during code-switching 1 and are not intrinsic to the languages themselves. A number of diphthongs which occur across word boundaries in spontaneous speech are also included in our phone set, for example in the Afrikaans words drie-en-twintig (‘twentythree ’). Examples include the Afrikaans words hy is (‘he is’) or the Afrikaans mother tongue pronunciation of the English word ‘about’.

The norm for /eɪ/ (as in face) in Cultivated and General varieties is [eɪ] notes a tendency for the onset to be opener the further one deviates from the standard, even to[æɪ]. Broad South African English is characterized by the onset being both open and back, [ʌɪ].

The Cultivated SAE realization of /aɪ/ (as in price) is close to RP [aɪ]. In General and Broad, the articulation of the first element is often monophthongized to [aː]. In Broad, the first element is somewhat back, but more forward and higher than /ɑː/.

Cultivated SAE usually realizes /aʊ/ (as in mouth) as [ɑ̈ʊ], while General again follows the tendency to monophthongize diphthongs, and often has [ɑː]. Broad has a much fronter onset.

In all varieties, /ɔɪ/ (as in choice) is usually [ɔɪ]; the onset can be as low as /ɒ/ for older Cultivated SAE speakers.

Consonants: Plosives

/p, b, t, d, k, ɡ/ The voiced and voiceless plosives are distinctive in South African English, and voiceless plosives are generally unaspirated in all positions in Broad South African English. Other varieties aspirate a voiceless plosive before a stressed syllable. The contrast is neutralized in Broad.

Broad speakers tend to pronounce /t, d/ with some dentition.

Fricatives and Affricates /f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ, x, h/ South African English is one of the very few varieties to have a velar fricative phoneme /x/, but this is only in words borrowed from Afrikaans (e.g. gogga [xoxə] 'insect').

The tendency for /θ/ to be realized as [f]  is a stereotypical Broad feature, but is more accurately associated with Afrikaans English.

As in many varieties of English, word-final /v, ð, z, ʒ/ are usually voiceless, and are distinguished only by the length of the preceding vowel.

The nasals /m, n, ŋ/ are not distinctive markers for any variety of South African English; though /n/ may be dental [n̪] before dental consonants.

Of course, there is a South African vocabulary. Some words peculiar to South African English include 'takkies', 'tackie' or 'tekkie' for sneakers (American) or trainers (British), 'bakkie' for a pick-up truck, 'lekker' for nice and 'jol' for party.

Several South African words, usually from Afrikaans or other indigenous languages of the region, have entered world English: apartheid, commando and mamba.

Let's watch another video, this is Siboniso Gaxa a  Bafana football player.

Australian Accent

I was thinking about writing about me, my thoughts or something like that but..  What if I told you a bit about what I’m studying at University? I’m learning different English accents around the world and I’ve decided to explain three accents that personally I think they are very interesting to produce and to understand as well. Here we start: let’s move to Australia.

Australian accent is a way of English language spoken in Australia. It is a relatively new dialect of English being just over 200 years old. It began diverging from British English shortly after the foundation of the Australian penal colony of New South Wales in 1788. In Colony period, Australia has been joined by military personnel and free settlers with their families. It is thought that children of the colonists created a new dialect that, after certain time, became Australian English. Children had contact with different dialects from England, particularly from London (Cockney).They created the new dialect from factors in the speech they heard around them. Although new settlers arrived, this new dialect of the children was strong enough to deflect the influence of new children. There is also evidence from early written sources that a new and distinct dialect was present in the colony by the 1830s, and history shows a language influence by Irish, Scots and Welsh, too. The first of the Australian gold rushes in the 1850s, began a much larger wave of immigration which would significantly influence the language. The influx of American military personnel in World War II brought further American influence; though most words were short-lived and only okay, you guys and gee have persisted and since the 1950s the American influence on language in Australia has mostly come from pop culture, the mass media, computer software and the internet.

Ok. That’s enough history, don’t you think? Let’s talk about some interesting things such as different accents.

According to the experts, there are three Australian accents. One is broad (think Crocodile Dundee or Steve Irwin). Most Aussies can speak this if they wish to, and some speak nothing else. Broad Australian is more common in the called “bush” or peripheral areas. The second version is referred to as general Australian, and this is typically used in radio announcers or on television. Then there is a dying form, educated Australian, which sounds closer to Received English. It is spoken by few people.

The "cultivated" style of English is fancied by most Australians to be indistinguishable from English, and it is fairly close: after a few months in Australia, most English people lose the ability to tell whether or not a "cultivated" speaker is English or Australian. Americans have problems in distinguishing that accent from the English accent. This style of "speaking properly" seems to be getting less common, if only because most "cultivated" speakers can and do use at least one other form of more local accent. The New Zealand accent is common in Australia, and can be hard to pick, even for an outsider who has been there for some time. Australians say it is easy: if we ask a New Zealander (called also “Kiwi”) to count to seven, the number between five and seven is sux, and lists are lusts. It's a subtle difference, and not really important. The 'Kiwi accent' is apparently more common in those from the South Island.

There are two other distinct forms of English that we detect in Australian accent. The "general Australian" is broader, and less "English", and it is more likely to contain references to manufactured products and cultural allusions and clever similes (such as "as mean as Hungry Tyson" or "as flash as a rat with a gold tooth"). "General Australian" usually involves less lip movement.

The broad Australian accent involves no lip movement at all (to keep flies out of the mouth, some say), more reliance on tones (perhaps because it carries over longer distances), and many impenetrable slang terms, including rhyming slang, often similar to (but differing from) Cockney rhyming slang. Australians think that it is a gross error to see their accent as deriving from Cockney, just because of a few fancied similarities in a few vowels and diphthongs.

Then there are the aboriginal words, which are names for places, animals or things that are used quite unconsciously, like tucker, which is food, and which may or may not be an aboriginal word, as well as bingey (stomach).

Last of all, there are words that are used in Australia in some way that the scholars of Oxford know not, that we will never find in the Oxford English Dictionary. Just as the Americans needed their Webster's, so Australians now have their own Macquarie Dictionary that tells them (and others) what they mean.

There are no strong variations in accent and pronunciation across different states and territories. There is some subtle regional variation. In Tasmania and Queensland, words such as "dance" and "grant" are usually heard with the older pronunciation of these words, using [æː]. In South Australia [aː] is the norm. In other states both pronunciations can be heard. Some speakers in those areas where [æː]/[æ] is found prefer to use [aː] in such words as a sign of higher social class. In words such as "pass", "can't", "last", all regional variants use [aː].

There are a few regionally-distributed phonetic features. For example centring diphthongs which are the vowels that occur in words like beard, air, sheer. In Western Australia we can hear diphthongs like the vowels in the words "ear" and "air" are pronounced as full diphthongs, it means that vowels require the tongue, jaw and lips to move during the speech. Those in the eastern states will tend to pronounce "fear" and "sheer" like "fee" and "she" respectively, without any jaw movement, while the westerners would pronounce them like "fia" and "shia". We can also hear a difference in pronunciation of the word “Salary” such as “salary” or “celery”. People who live in South Australia say "pool" and "school" like "pewl" and "skewl", while the rest of the Australian population pronounces them as they are spelt.

Australian English is also used by the majority of migrants who arrive during their childhood or early adolescence. The children of immigrant families generally adopt the majority speech patterns of the adopted country rather than those of their parents due to children's need to conform to their peer group. Another important point is that we have to think that over the past 20 years, there has been extensive sociopolitical change in Australia, too. All this, has  influenced  Australian English language to become as we know nowadays.

Now, we have to learn a bit about  Australian English phonology, let’s see the following imagine:

The vowels of Australian English can be divided into two categories: long and short vowels. The short vowels, consisting only of monophthongs, mostly correspond to the lax vowels used in analyses of Received Pronunciation. The long vowels, consisting of both monophthongs and diphthongs, mostly correspond to its tense vowels and centring diphthongs. Unlike most varieties of English, it has a phonemic lenght distinction that compresses, shortens or removes these features. Many speakers have also changed  /dj/, /sj/ and /tj/ into /dʒ/, /ʃ/ and /tʃ/, producing standard pronunciations such as [ t͡ʃʰuːn] for tune. In colloquial speech intervocalic /t/ undergoes voicing and flapping to the alveolar tap [ɾ] after the stressed syllable and before unstressed vowels (as in butter, party) and syllabic /l/, though not before syllabic /n/ (bottle vs button [batn]), as well as at the end of a word or morpheme before any vowel (what else, whatever). In formal speech /t/ is retained. However, the alveolar flap is normally distinguishable by Australians from the intervocalic alveolar stop /d/, which is not flapped, thus ladder and latter,  metal and medal,  and coating and codingremain distinct; further, when coating becomes coatin' , the t remains voiceless, thus [kʌutn]. This is a quality that Australian English shares with some other varieties of English for example the called Linking /r/. Australian English is a non-rhotic accent, which means that it does not allow '/r/ sounds before pauses or before other consonants. So the words “car” and “card” will not contain the /r/sound. However, the /r/ sound can occur when a word that has a final “r” in the spelling comes before another word that starts with a vowel. For example, in “car alarm” the sound /r/ can occur in “car” because here it comes before another word beginning with a vowel. This is called a linking /r/. The words “far”, “far more” and “farm” do not contain an /r/ but “far out” will contain the linking /r/ sound because the next word starts with a vowel sound.                                                                                                                     

Another important point is Intrusive or Epenthetic /r/ . This is when an /r/ may be inserted before a vowel in words that do not have “r” in the spelling. For example, "drawing" will sound like "draw-ring" and "saw it" like sound like "sore it".                                                                                                    

In movies we can hear the sound /j/ in young speakers where /tj/, /dj/, /sj/ and /zj/  become single affricate or fricative sounds: For example in "tube", and "tune", the /tj/ sound becomes the affricate "ch". An affricate also occurs in "dune", where it will be pronounced exactly like "june".

Diminutives which are used to indicate familiarity, are also important to know as a change of “original language”. Some common examples are arvo (afternoon),  barbie (barbecue), smoko (originally a smoking break, now often used to refer to morning tea), Aussie (Australian) and pressie (present (gift)). The last two are pronounced /ˈɒzi/ and /ˈprɛzi/ respectively, never with a voiceless 's'.

This may also be done with people's names to create nicknames (other English speaking countries create similar diminutives). For example, "Gazza" from Gary.

Interesting, isn’t it? Let’s watch a video now. Could we do that accent? I think it’s a bit difficult but after a lot of practice it may be possible. Don’t you think?