My Admirable Mother Tongue

Willem Nel

During my childhood days I never actually knew the advantages I had of the different languages I was exposed to. Today I am proud of my heritage and of the upbringing I had as a young boy from Africa. I respect the diversity of the different languages and meanings. It is lekker (good) that I can be proud of my culture.

I grew up with a very slang type of English language, as my mother grew up as an Afrikaans Rhodesian with an English accent and always muddled English and Afrikaans and here and there also some Shona. To make matters worse, I was exposed to Russian words as well. It was garasho (good) that I never knew which of the words were English, Afrikaans, Shona or Russian. I was hardly ever corrected as my family wasn’t aware that they were muddling their languages as this was the way of communication at home.

I recall my mother telling me when she left Rhodesia for schooling in South Africa, it was a huge step for her with the crooked Afrikaans, throwing English words all over her vocabulary, and could never understand that sebenza (work) in actual fact was not an English word as she always told her friends that she will have to sebenza (work) harder than them because she had to start using the correct Afrikaans words.

Another time my mom was in trouble for not doing well in her Afrikaans language test and the teacher was furious and used harsh words, at the end the teacher apologised and said “jammer vir my Fraans” (harsh words), my mom thought that this was a new type of French which she was not aware of.

This was in contradiction to my family members who thought that I was awesome when throwing a Russian word in a sentence, which at that stage I was not aware of that it is not pure Afrikaans or English.

When I turned five I was going to have a big birthday party and insisted on writing the invitations out myself — I asked my mother how to spell presents (instead of presence) not saying in which sense I wanted to use it. On all the invitations I wrote ……Please confirm your presents to my mom.

After being enrolled in an Afrikaans Junior School, the teachers thought that it was quite cute that there was a multi-cultural, well traveled, child at school. I remember as a young rugby player I would always say to my mates bistro (quick) pass the ball thinking that they knew what I was in fact trying to say pass the ball quicker. It was only many years later when I started Elementary School and concentrated a bit more on the English language that I realized it was not English but Russian.

I remember when I had my first practical English homework in Grade three, we had to choose certain words and make sentences with them. Amongst others I chose the word Ants. I wrote “We are having a big problem with Aunts. They are all over the garden.” My teacher asked, “Do you have a lot of Aunts living at your house?” I replied “Yes and we can’t get rid of them”.

Whilst attending Elementary school in Afrikaans, I realized that there were pieces of all different languages mixed in my language such as once I told my friends that a certain girl in our class was moshe (beautiful) which I thought was an Afrikaans word, to my dismay only to find out that it was Shona.

After obtaining my first mobile phone, my mother and I were busy texting each other about a serious case — the choosing of different subjects. She did not know all the abbreviations in English on whats app and in the end she wrote “LOL”. Needless to say how upset I was as I thought that she did not care at all about my future — only to find out that evening that she thought it meant ”Lots of Love”.

It is only now since being at AAS that I realise that a language such as English spoken in a classroom, is much different than the English spoken by other Anglophone countries.

I suppose that this code switching will disappear the more I realise that there are different forms of communication within the English language. I remain very proud of my heritage as well as my culture and really hope that it won’t disappear as this type of language is my grassroots.

I value the different mixed languages with English which I speak, as it is an unique identity of myself and where my grassroots are from.