Deon du Plessis

I wasn’t out to eavesdrop on a whole damn country. But somewhere along the line that’s what happened.

As a linguist I probably spend more time than most listening – really listening – to how people speak. It isn’t just about what they say, but about how they say it. It’s about how the air fills the space between their teeth and tongues.

I especially love vowels. Those sounds that fill the weight of our identity, upbringing, geography… In some of my research, they’ve been whispering stories of South Africa’s complex regional past. And its audible present.

I analysed South African English, a broad category of English that that assumes that it is spoken the same all over the country. Or worse, assumes that it’s “supposed” to sound like British English. The consensus reached by several mid-20^th century scholars, such as Anthony Traill and more extensively Len Lanham and Roger Lass, was that South African English “standardised” in the mid-20^th century and there was no more regional variation, no more dialects, especially among younger speakers.

This supposed “neutral” English, used in schools and on the news, was thought to have flattened out any trace of where people came from. (Of course, there has always been variation based on speakers’ social class, ethnicity, and that kind of thing, so please bear in mind that I am talking specifically about region and mother tongue speakers here.)

But the thinking goes that dialects would emerge again at some point in time. Language is often messier than we’d like to think.

I spoke with people from Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg and looked at the vowels in words like trap, dress, and kit. I recorded these interviews and plotted (as on a Cartesian plane) people’s vowels. I wanted to see if any of the earlier regional variation survived. Or resurfaced.

It did.

The interesting thing is that it seems in South African English, dialects are not only in the process of reemerging, but they are remarkably similar to what they were before being levelled into one, non-regional thing. This actually corresponds quite closely to what happened in Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachussets, USA, where people started speaking more like those on the mainland until they didn’t.

For example, Capetonians say the “a” sound like you get in the word trap markedly “lower”. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)’s terms, you’d write it [æ], and you could also say it sounds more like “a” and less like “e” (you can listen to what I mean here and here, but note that the difference is exaggerated a lot). And in Durban, people said the “i” in the word “kit” in the middle of their mouths, not the front like people mostly would (listen here and here).

These differences might seem subtle, but they are not meaningless. Regional differences in South African English have not been erased – they have only learned to be more subtle.

This kind of work always brings me back to the masters who laid the foundation. One is Raj Mesthrie, one of the greatest South African linguists. (It’s also worth saying, he’s just a really nice guy.) A few years ago I had the privilege of contributing to a volume, also known as a festschrift, in honour of Raj. The chapter I wrote drew heavily from Roger Lass’s (1990) work which was from 25 years earlier. Roger was a mentor of Raj’s. It’s a rule of thumb that there are around 25 years between different generations, so it was good that we could get that one-generation-depth.

People have thought that there is no more regional variation in South Africa, that there are no more dialects, but that seems to be wrong. Something that is undeniable is that how we use language, its variation and nuances, expresses who we are. Maybe that’s the most human thing about language. It’s never really settled. It’s always in motion. Like us.