Talk like a South African

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Layback Bear, post: 7579, member: 23 said:

I take it English is not the language of choice in South Africa.

Almost everyone can speak English... in some or other dialect. Since we have 11 official languages ours seems to be made up bits and pieces of other language combined with English.

Obviously a lot of words are derived from Afrikaans (kind of Dutch). No problem for me as a German to recognize them. Nice - I like.

whs, post: 7707, member: 58 said:

Obviously a lot of words are derived from Afrikaans (kind of Dutch). No problem for me as a German to recognize them. Nice - I like.

Sort of. The common greeting here is 'howzit my bru'. Howzit obviously a combined form of 'how is it'. 'My bru' comes from the Afrikaans 'my broer' but is pronounced in the colloquial way i.e. 'may brew'.

Others just say 'kunjani', the Xhosa word for the English phrase 'how are you'. One replies with 'impilile, wena?' which means 'I am fine, and you?'

It is nice to see that the Bantu languages do not get all lost. E.g. in France, they made the terrible mistake to supress the local languages for centuries. That's how they nearly completely lost the Celtic language in the Bretagne and the Langue d'Oc/Langues d'oïl in the south. Now that they got smarter they are trying to resurrect those languages.