Speak English anyway you damn please, please

Like most people who are multilingual, my home language is the one I'm most proficient in. My grasp of English is a distant second, tragically.

I say it's tragic because I'm married to a woman whose mother tongue is that mongrel comprising seTswana, sePedi, seSotho and Afrikaans that folks from Pretoria speak, sePitori. This should be my second language. But my efforts at it can best be described as seZutho; seSotho spoken with a strong isiZulu accent.

That said, I have discovered that English constitutes about 74.6% of my interactions with other humans. The remaining 25.4% is split between isiZulu, seZutho, Klingon and Drunken Gibberish.

This is the reality of most South Africans: being forced to use English, our lingua franca. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy the English language. Although not as much as I enjoy Afrikaans, for instance.

story_article_left1

If you're ever staggering out of a Hillbrow brothel at 3am you can nip a potential mugging in the bud by yelling, "Raak jy net my arm en ek sal jou bliksem, jou moer!" That doesn't carry quite as much weight in English.

But English has been very useful. Try to imagine how the struggle for liberation would have panned out if the "distinguished gentlemen" (Dube, Plaatje, Tengo, Gumede etcetera) who gathered in Mangaung on the 8th of January 1912 didn't have this common language. Or how the DA, UDM, EFF and ACDP could have organised the recent Tshwane putsch.

I don't have a gripe with English. My beef is with first-language English speakers. It is apparently not enough that those Poms from that minuscule island employed muskets and superior airs to force their language on the rest of us.

I do think it's both tragic and arrogant that in the 2016st year of our Lord, one can't use 140 characters on Twitter to share one's thoughts without some smug penishead correcting one's English grammar. My standard retort these days is, "Lalela mbombo wakho, ngizosuke ngikhulume ngolukaMageba bese ulahleka kakhulu ngoba uyisiphukuphuku."

I don't think people have any idea just how annoying it is to have someone from KwaZulu-Natal - who has been surrounded by isiZulu speakers for all 45 years of his existence without picking up more than four isiZulu words - correcting your pronunciation or grammar.

There would be consensus that one was an impregnable fortress of stupidity if one went to live in Germany for 10 years and returned without having learnt any German.

block_quotes_start The month that comes after this one is often referred to as "Sacktember" in my neck of the woods block_quotes_end

A few months ago an e-mail landed in my inbox. It was from an irate reader who couldn't believe that I had used "busses" as a plural for "bus". In my defence, I had been reading Norman Mailer that week and we know Americans have "special" spelling.

I think my reader should have been happy that I had managed to insert the "u" when I spelt "colour" and "labour" in the same column. When I read American literature I always imagine a pile of unused u's staring at "humor" and "candor" with sad faces.

From now on I'm going to refuse to be called out for minor deviations from the way that woman with a penchant for silly hats uses the language. It's not as if her direct subjects can speak any decent either, hey.

Have you ever been to the east of London? People from that place will say things like "I would of passed that m afematics test but I didn't bovver wif stoodyin."

It is for this reason that when I become minister of basic education in 2019, ahead of my impending presidency in 2024, I will institute my SEAYDP programme. The Speak English Anyway You Damn Please programme.

story_article_right2

I believe that hearing their language being butchered is an insignificant trade-off for English speakers being able to converse with anyone across the globe.

For instance, black folks from Gauteng refer to the place where we park cars as "packing". I say let them call it "packing", who gives a flying drone? The same people refer to taking time off from work as "leaf". Good. My Xhosa brethren call the number between two and four "tree". So what? People from my home province refer to the same number as "kree". And that's fine.

The month that comes after this one is often referred to as "Sacktember" in my neck of the woods. My neighbours from Brakpan eat "wif" a fork. So what? Minister Razzamataz refers to "Souf Africa" as a "cowntry". No one has died as a result. We know what he means.

Some 23 years ago I was in a taxi from Pinetown to Durban. I needed to get off at The Pavilion shopping centre, so I called out, "Pavilion!". The driver drove right past. A good Samaritan yelled out, "Pava, driver!" and he stopped, mumbling something about not having time for coconuts who speak English through their noses.

She turned to me, "Listen my baby, next time you want to get off you must say Pava. This place is called Pavalion, not Pavilion." She was right. And this is why, when I'm in a restaurant, I always ask for Tobasco sauce. This Tabasco nonsense is not working out. Viva the SEAYDP programme!

E-mail Ndumiso Ngcobo at lifestyle@sundaytimes.co.za and follow him on Twitter @NdumisoNgcobo