Namblish

I’m learning another new language. Forget Afrikaans, Otjiherero, this one is far more important for every day use. ‘Namblish’ is English colonised by the Namibians. Although English is the official language here, it only came in 16 years ago, after Independence, as an alternative from the ‘oppressors’ Afrikaans or German. Many people do speak English, but not always at an intelligible level, and many have never learnt the true pronunciation of certain words, hence Namblish. Often English is their 3^rd or 4^th language, after various tribal languages

 and sometimes Afrikaans. It is this hybrid language that people from different tribes seem to communicate in.I’m not too bad at understanding the accents here, but the common mispronunciation of words gets increasingly confusing. Considering many English teachers can’t speak it properly, and others learn their English from American movies, it’s not surprising that English mutated into Namblish. One of the speakers freely interchanged ‘prostitution’ and ‘prosecution’ throughout one talk, leaving me entirely baffled as to what was being discussed. And there are many more confusing than the mixing up of ‘specific’ and ‘pacific’ that you get with some simpletons in
Britain. Namblish has its own vocabulary as well. I’ll share some with you once I figure out what people are saying. I must admit that I am picking up a few hugely irritating local linguistic traits. I haven’t said ‘yeah’ in weeks since the Afrikaans ‘ja’ transplanted it, and I’ve adopted the highly irritating habit of putting ‘nee’ at the end of any question, and saying ‘is it?’ instead of ‘really?’. Please don’t take the piss too much when I get home!!

Whilst on the discussion of language, I would like to apologise for some of the comments that have been posted on this site. Turns out I am not immune from internet porn spam, and am sorry for anyone who was subjected to the filth that found its way onto this site. These posts have now been removed, but I can’t guarantee that they won’t return.