Ag ja, Afrikaans is mos sexy

● While Afrikaans took a podium spot in a global poll on sexy accents, subtle differences in lilt from Aggeneys in the Northern Cape to Zonderwater in Pretoria have South Africans asking, which one won?

Bested only by New Zealand, the Afrikaans accent was this week ranked second in a global survey by travel website Big7Travel which saw 1.5-million people polled on exactly who was easiest on the ear.

Despite all of Afrikaans’s different inflections and nuanced differences from one community to the next, experts say South Africans are more interested in the meaning of words than how they may sound.

Nhlanhla Thwala, academic director at Pearson Institute of Higher Education, said the meaning of what was being said trumped tone and tenor.

“What we look for is the meaning rather than dramatic pronunciation and we are very accepting of other people’s way of speaking,” he said.

The ultra-fine differences in Afrikaans dialects would probably never change. “Because of our different language groups, the mother tongue will always bleed into the language we speak.”

With 11 official languages and all their dialects, the people of Mzansi had learned a certain tolerance, said Thwala, adding that it was impossible to quantify the different iterations of an accent.

Despite this sentiment, the International Dialects of English Archive is trying to record all accents, a mammoth task on South African soil. Since 1998, with 1,500 samples from 120 countries, it has gathered 52 accents from these shores.

Language practitioner Cornelia du Plooy said the taal may have risen through the global mix of saucy accents because it was often thought of as romantic, and its lyrical, soft flow made it appealing.

“It is a Germanic language but much softer than Dutch as it doesn’t have the hard-sounding consonants and vowels,” she said.

Zulu speaker Freman Nkosi, 27, who works at a car wash in Johannesburg, said he suffered prejudice more because of his job than his accent.

He said his white customers often adjusted their accents when speaking to him.

Afrikaans writer, Diana Ferrus, said: “I believe we are getting really close to having one South African accent. The melting pot is truly melting.”