‘Good morning, goeiemôre,” says the call-centre operator, going on to mention the name of ”my” insurance company. Phew, I’m relieved I dialled the -correct number.
But there’s something slightly niggling about this conversation. ”Good morning, goeiemôre,” she said. No sawubona, dumela or thobela, or any form of greeting in my home language, one of the 11 official languages of South Africa. This from a company that reaps healthy profits every year from the significant patronage of many individuals, families and special societies who, like me, emanate from the much-touted ”black market”. And yet, this same company has made no attempt to learn a simple ”hello” in my language.
But can we, as black South Africans, blame corporate South Africa?
Can we blame it when successful black parents have made it en vogue to suckle their young solely on English — to their own embarrassment when elders from less privileged corners of the country visit.
This Xitsonga-, Sesotho- or SiSwati-free diet is catching on even among less bourgeois parents. Catch a taxi to Khayelitsha, Soweto or anywhere in our country and you’ll find some parent only speaking English to her child, all the way to the rank.
Can we lay blame when we don’t correct our white colleagues and friends when they mispronounce our names every day? I find it fascinating that foreigners I meet quickly perfect the articulation of my Xhosa name, often after just a few attempts.
Can we blame corporate South Africa for making little effort to speak to us when we allow people hardly acquainted with us to call us by our nicknames or abbreviations of our first names? Every now and then I meet a black person who offers an English middle name at the first sign of a stranger struggling to pronounce his or her Tshivenda name.
How can we blame corporate South Africa when heavyweight black professionals struggle to express themselves in their home languages when interviewed on the Zulu evening news? How did we get so clued-up and yet so clueless, at the same time?
Can we place the blame elsewhere when even black professionals in Johannesburg socialise among themselves in English, when we’re fluent in at least two of each other’s mother tongues.
Even among other Africans from north of our borders I sense some disdain towards their languages. For example, many foreign students from wealthy Mozambican and Angolan families speak only Portuguese to one another. Asked what language they speak, some of my friends who originate from the Democratic Republic of Congo will reply that they are French — not French-speaking, but French.
As much as we may still have beef with their language, we would do well to learn from the speakers of the language Hector Pieterson, Hastings Ndlovu and many others died resisting. The Afrikaners I meet on a daily basis are not as jingoistic about their language as the then-minister of Bantu education, Michael Botha, who in 1976 imposed Afrikaans on black scholars; but, boy, do they embrace their language.
As a case in point, watch Afrikaner national sports players in a post-match TV interview. He or she will almost always answers the first question in Afrikaans, even though it may be fielded in English.
On numerous excursions through bookstores, I have seen shelves and shelves of books written in Afrikaans but none written in my native Xhosa or Zulu, Ndebele or Tswana; the reason being that many Afrikaners will buy books written in their language, unlike us, so books written in our mother tongues are not commercially viable.
Afrikaners celebrate their language — a month hardly passes by without one hearing of an imminent Afrikaans film, literary or theatre festival.
Afrikaners read and write many publications of varying calibre in their own taal, from trashy tabloid to weighty business weeklies.
Afrikaners eat, breathe and live their language without contempt. Go to your favourite online news portal, written in English of course, and you’ll likely find an option allowing you to consume those very same articles in Afrikaans.
When grocery shopping, I encounter Afrikaans parents speaking Afrikaans to their children.
At work, Afrikaners who speak English to colleagues from other communities will effortlessly switch over to Afrikaans among themselves.
My point is this: that we should regale ourselves with our mother tongue. Because no single language has a monopoly on smartness, romance or handsomeness. After all, several of today’s leading gadgets and innovations are conceived in languages other than English, such as Japanese, German and Mandarin.
Mapping global linguistics
In Japan people think it rude to say ”you” — and in India there are six different ways to address a person, says Krysia Diver.
And if you need to find out which countries take tea, and which prefer a cup of cha, the world’s first atlas on the composition of languages should be able to help.
In a world where globalisation leads to the death of one language every fortnight, it is hoped that the World Atlas of Language Structures will help to revive an interest in linguistics.
German linguists have spent five years compiling the book, working with 40 language experts specialising in languages ranging from Chinese to those spoken by only 100 adults.
Roland Kriessling, a linguist specialising in African languages, said: ”In Namibia, there are many languages which sound completely bizarre to the Western ear.
”!Xoop, for example, has different clicking sounds, including the tut, the horse’s hoof sound and the kiss. The phonetic complexity of !Xoop could put it into the Guinness Book of Records.”
The atlas contains details of about 2 600 languages, where they prevail and how they are used. It also includes a map of sentence structures around the world.
Readers can also discover languages that are rich in vocabulary, or that use restricted terminology. In Native American, for example, there is no distinction between the arm and the hand.
Michael Cysouw, one of the atlas’s authors, told The Guardian: ”If you ask the average person how many languages are in the world, he will probably say a couple of hundred. In fact, there are 7 000.”
Despite highlighting the range of languages, the atlas does not explain how language evolved.
”The atlas draws together information about languages, but its purpose is not to draw conclusions,” Dr Cysouw said. ”It invites people to investigate what lies behind the linguistics.” — Â