Zambian English

Zambian English is odd.  Perfectly understandable, but odd.

It's derived from British English, so it's non-rhotic -- if an r-sound is terminal, or interior before a consonant, it disappears.  So car, park and farmer become cah, pahk, and fahmah.

That's easy.  But they also do some odd things to vowels.  Many of them seem to rise up a bit, so that nurse becomes nehss.  Others fall, so that gaps become gups.  And some get stretched a little, so that here and again become heah and agayne.  Combine these, and shareholders becomes shay ho das.

There's also a reluctance to clump too many consonants together.  Clusters of three or more consonant sounds are likely to be broken up by a vowel, so that a word like mindset will acquire a third syllable: mind-a-set.  On the other hand, many polysyllabalic words are pronounced with great precision; interest, for which all Americans would say "intrest", here is spoken exactly as spelled.

They also use "yah" a lot as an all-purpose particle.  "The amount of capital available is small, yah?  So the problem, yah, is not the interest rates.  They are just charging what the market will bear, yah."  -- I strongly suspect this is a Dutch "ja", acquired from the Boers.  The problem with this theory is that there were very few Boers in Zambia.  There were a lot just across the river in Zimbabwe, and of course millions of them down in South Africa, but not many in Zambia. 

There are some pleasant expressions.  My favorite so far: where an American would say "and so on" or "and like that", a Zambian says "all this and what have you".  I like that.

The Zambians say they can tell a Zimbabwean accent from a Zambian one, and also that they can usually tell which tribal group a person is from by the accent in English.  I'm not there yet.  But it's a pleasant accent, and not at all hard to understand.  In a week, I've only been confused once.  That was when the man from the Millers Association was explaining the problems they had trying to shape government policy:

"We try to work together with others in the supply chain.  We work with the farmers.  We work with the grain traders.  We try to work with the beggars, even."

"... the beggars?"

"Yes.  But they're very stubborn.  The beggars have their own association, but they don't want to work with us."

"Er..."

"They think because they are buying our flour, we can't be on the same team."

"...the bakers.  The association of bakers."

"Yes."

Some linguists call these African accents "New Englishes".  I don't see it, myself.  If they were using a lot of loan words, or odd constructions derived from the underlying Bantu, then maybe.  But they don't seem to.  It's just English with another funny accent -- no stranger than Dublin or Dallas.

Comments

[Gene Callahan]

"It's derived from British English, so it's non-rhotic -- if an r-sound is terminal, or interior before a consonant, it disappears."

London English is non-rhotic, but not all of Britain has a London accent! Cornwall, Devon, Hertfordshire and some other places pronounce their r's properly/