DAWGS, BRODDERS & COWNTRYMEN
Freedom of speech means freedom to speak in any accent, writes Ndumiso Ngcobo
THIS is Freedom Day week, when South Africans are meant to celebrate the hard-won freedoms that culminated in April 27 1994.
Over the past 22 years, there has been a discernible shift in the tone with which freedom is defined in these parts. There is a growing emphasis on attaching addenda such as “with freedom comes responsibility” and “freedom of speech is not absolute” etc. True.
However, over the years, “we” seem to have stretched this truism to “Freedom of expression does not include the freedom to speak the way you want to”.
As the elections approach, an old criticism of DA leader Mmusi Maimane has resurfaced. It stems from the fact that he has two accents, depending on to whom he is talking. Apparently he speaks with a Model C twang when addressing Paarl housewives; and a Diepsloot bricklayer’s accent when addressing a predominantly black crowd invading Luthuli House in Joburg.
I’m not a DA spokesperson so I’ll leave it to whatshername, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s long-lost cousin, to defend Mmusi’s allegedly pliable accent.
My interest, though, stems from a 2010 article in The Telegraph (UK), about US scientists saying that humans naturally but subconsciously imitate the speech patterns of others.
This we do in order to “empathise and affiliate” with others. According to one Professor Rosenblum: “We intentionally imitate subtle aspects of each other’s mannerisms, postures and facial expressions. We also imitate each other’s speech patterns.”
From my experience, this sounds about right. Last week, a friend of mine admitted to being a victim of this phenomenon. We agreed we’re both ultra-cautious when we talk to folks who stutter because we find ourselves stuttering subconsciously. True story. My friend said his affliction was so bad he even once caught himself walking funny because he was next to a fellow with prosthetic limbs, with embarrassing consequences.
I also have a close friend who has a facial tic that makes him blink at about double the normal rate. When I’m having drinks with him I find myself consciously widening my eyes to avoid blinking 120 times a minute.
But back to accents. We suffer from a startling obsession with folks’ accents when they speak English in this country. (Or “cowntry” as Minister Mbalula prefers to call it.) It boggles the mind just how much precious energy we waste on bickering about it.
I remember a Grade 9 teacher of mine haranguing some hapless classmate because he pronounced the word “poor” as “pooh-wah”.
“Jislaaik man! It’s ‘pour’, you hear? ‘Pour’!” The fellow let him finish and repeated, “Pooh-wah”.
Among us darker-hued folks, there’s a low-intensity war raging around this language from that tiny island that gave the world Yorkshire pudding. And there are two sides. On the one hand, you have those whose favourite pastime is to ridicule people who speak English with a “township or village accent”. This is presumably because a country bumpkin with a PhD in quantum physics is “inferior” to someone with spiky hair and saggy pants walking around trendy Rosebank addressing his ostensibly canine friends as, “Namsayin’, dawg,”.
On the other hand, you have the Twang Police, who have made it their mission to detect even a hint of a posh Michaelhouse in anyone’s speech and then to descend upon them like dung beetles on a sewerage spill.
The fact of the matter is that people speak the way they do mostly because of how people around them speak. If they change their environment, many people’s accents will be altered accordingly, some more quickly than others. I remember watching former tennis star Wayne Ferreira being interviewed after he’d spent just one summer in Australia and thinking he could be called Bruce. If it had been someone from Soweto, all hell would have broken loose. Even the ordinarily not-easy-to-sway Mrs N returned home after a six-month stint in London peppering her speech with “yeah” every two sentences. She didn’t even know she was doing it until I pointed it out.
Another friend came back from The Isles after two years “finking” about “fings”. During the Malemaand-Gang ejection process from the ANC, I remember my own accentobsession moment when I tweeted that our current deputy president had a tinge of St Stithians Old Boys in his speech. Many people assumed I was taking a swipe at him. But I was merely observing the obvious, that he has spent thousands of hours in the boardroom.
To paraphrase a friend of mine, “I spent years at Roedean. What would make me fake is if I consciously tried to sound like I went to a school in Ga-Matlala.” It’s a universal phenomenon, this. If you don’t believe me, go look for a clip of former England manager Steve McClaren talking English in a Dutch accent during his stint at Dutch side, FC Twente.
I’ll continue to fight the subconscious urge to blink rapidly at my friend. But if I ever live in Lagos for more than a month, you best believe I’ll come back calling my siblings my “brodders”. That’s what Freedom Day means to me. That includes extending to Mmusi the freedom to sound the way he wants to sound on any given Sunday. E-mail lifestyle@sundaytimes.co.za On Twitter @NdumisoNgcobo
Humans naturally but subconsciously imitate the speech patterns of others The Twang Police have made it their mission to detect even a hint of a posh Michaelhouse