Eating naartjies in the bioscope: a little guide to South African English | Mind your language

The vocabulary and grammar of spoken South African English are coated in a fine layer of Afrikaans dust. It's been there so long that most of us no longer noticeThe first English lesson I ever gave was in a little language school in a sprawling Taiwanese city. The theme was Fruit, a subject about as straightforward as it gets for a native English speaker. Unless you're from South Africa.To prepare, I flipped through the previous teacher's handmade flashcards and consulted my English guidebook for the names of the "exotic" fruits found in Asia – apple-shaped Chinese pears and otherworldly dragon fruit. But when I flipped over the card showing an innocuous-looking orange citrus fruit, my stomach dropped. Everyone I knew would call it a naartjie ("naah-chi"), and I suddenly realised that this wasn't actually an English word.I'd heard of clementines and satsumas, but were either of these naartjie in English? I had to enlist the help of my bemused Chinese co-teacher, who told me "tangerine", and, later, "cantaloupe". (Spanspek, the Afrikaans word for "cantaloupe" that all South Africans use, is literally translated as "Spanish bacon", allegedly because a 19th-century Cape governor had a Spanish wife who always chose fresh fruit over a big English breakfast. Their mystified Afrikaans servants coined the word.)After that first lesson, I had endless opportunities to marvel at how stealthily my mother tongue had colonised the Afrikaans lexicon. I would tell my students that I was ho...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Tags: Comment Blogposts guardian.co.uk Media Language South Africa Source Type: news