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The murder of our local tongue
07/12/2004 08:12 - (SA)
My mother is a spicy combination of Portuguese, South African, Welsh and Estonian. My father is English. With this potent cocktail running through my veins, Brazil as my country of birth and London as my second home, I am probably about as South African as they come.
I like it here. I like the weather and the countryside and the lifestyle and quite a few of the people. I even like the accent. Most of the time.
I'm not crazy about the "flettened" vowels, or the overuse of "laaik", but when you get right down to it, South African English has a rich history, and, when nicely spoken, can be very pleasing to the ear.
However, it is in the language's representation overseas that South African begins to fall short. We seem to be taking over from Eastern Europeans as the favourite villain sidekick in action movies.
For some reason, it is assumed that we are good at nuclear bombs and (more understandably) diamond smuggling. But the people trotting out our native tongue in films are doing it a great disservice.
At the movies
The swimmer husband in Muriel's Wedding was so focussed on injecting no vitality whatsoever into his words in an attempt to replicate the language that he became a wholly unlikable character.
Val Kilmer's representation of a stonehead Capetonian in The Saint had South African audiences rolling in the aisles.
The recognition of our accent in a movie is a slow process - usually because it's allocated to bit parts with few lines. After the second utterance issued by such a characters, audience members start leaning forward in their seats.
The next line sees the beginnings of mutterings between audience members, while the fouth flat, guttural issuing of a line brings on a few subdued titters.
We'd love it if they got it right. Wouldn't that be a proud moment for South Africa? It would mean that we had truly arrived on the international scene.
But I think that the real reason that no one can adequately emulate a South African accent is that we never celebrate it ourselves.
Wholesale voice
Radio stations, the purveyors of the spoken word, instead of investing in the rich vocal ranges of local talent, take local talent, to promote local products, and make these poor people speak in American accents.
This is a generalisation, obviously, but there is one very specific example that always springs to mind.
In promoting its release of a compilation of South African music, one of our leading radio stations used the voice of a preppy young American, stating "this is hot"!
While the inference could be that "this is so hot, even Americans like it", the message actually comes across as, "for this to be successfully marketed as hot, we require the endorsement of an American".
And even though there are some great ads using South African accents, copywriters struggle with local parlance when they're scripting.
They write as if they're composing promotional material for America in the fifties.
And you end up with ads for a car, where a young African child starts the vocalisation of his dream with "I sure wish...", or, in promoting a petrol station, an attendant comments to the child of his client, "who's a good boy, then?"
Both turns of phrase have not been heard on our shores unless uttered by tourists since Huguenot and Dutch tongues first collided.
Copywriters take notice
Surely we can do better than this? Copywriters should be made to read their ad scripts a couple of times to see if their delivery sounds natural.
They should be taught to think in South African. Radio stations should promote our music using our tongue. We can all learn a lesson from the Samsung ad, where the lekker South African oke takes a swat at the annoying American.
"Dude, why do you keep talking like that?"
"Because it feels so good when I stop."
Serena de Souza says "lekker" when she's happy and "eish" when she stubs her toe.
Send your comments to Serena
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