Funny Accents

All Americans, although reluctantly, agree that the British accent is better in nearly every way. A British person who comes to the States is generally lauded for his cutting wit and inexhaustible charm, and a Brit will always have the upper hand on an American in wooing the ladies, despite how crooked his teeth may be. We may joke at how they call a “flashlight” a “torch” and the funny way they say “herb” by distinctly pronouncing the “h”, but there is no doubt the American accent is inferior.

Kenya was a British colony for a long time, and has therefore been subjected to the British way of speaking. But because English tends to be taught as a third language to many Kenyans, it becomes incorrigibly altered and twisted in the most interesting ways.

A few examples of this interesting fusion: In Mombasa there is a place called “Marikiti” pronounced “Mar-ee-key-tee.” It is a place where many people come to sell their produce and their goods. Only later did I find out that the name is actually supposed to be “Market” but it was just spoken in a Swahili accent, and the name stuck. As another example, I was looking over the attendance list of a woman's group, where each woman was required to write their name and sign. Some of these women have not had much schooling, and one particular lady named “Caroline” wrote her name as “Rarolini” or “Ra-row-lee-nee.” Because people pronounce her name “Rarolini,” she wrote her name as she thought it to be spelled. It sounded more like a type of pasta than a name, and I couldn't help but think it was the cutest thing ever.

Certain tribal languages in Kenya often mix and match the “L” and the “R” sounds. Kikuyu people especially have a difficult time saying words like “Large Ladders” or “Parallelogram”. But my favorite is how people call semi-trucks “Rollies.” The British term for semi's is “lorries,” but because of this L-R confusion, it comes out perhaps more appropriately as "rollies" - Those semi's do have lots of wheels.

But sometimes this dependence on phonetics becomes a barrier to communication.

I walked up to the taxi driver and I asked him in Swahili to take me to the “Leopard Lodge,” which I said in English. He looked at me as if he had no idea what I was saying. I was amazed to think he did not know of the place. Taxi drivers usually have an incredible working knowledge of their area, and I had just seen a massive sign with the “Leopard Lodge” written on it, so the place was definitely not obscure. I repeated myself, speaking very slowly this time. Still, he looked at me puzzlingly, trying to mimic the name I was saying. At last I just said the Swahili word for “Leopard” and he then looks at me with an eased expression, “Ohhhh,” he breathed. “You want the Lay-oh-pard Lodge.” I chuckled as I heard him pronounce it. I had forgotten that the Kenyan way of saying English words is to pronounce every single letter, so he could not at all make out the way I was saying it: “lep-rrd.”

The other day I asked my counterpart if she was going to watch the meteor shower at night these coming nights. It was supposed to be one of the biggest showers of the year, and it was to be visible in the southern hemisphere. My counterpart is very fluent in English, yet she still looked at me completely confused. “What am I going to look out for tonight?” she asked worriedly.
“The meteor shower!” I said again.
“What?”
“Meteor. Shower.”
“The meat, what?” She repeated, exasperated.
“Do you know what meteor is? Here let me write it down.”
I wrote it down. M-E-T-E-O-R. S-H-O...
“Ooohh. May-tay-or!” She exclaimed, as she saw the first word completely written.
“Ah, yes. May-tay-or. Sorry!” I laughed again to myself. The way we Americans pronounce meteor is more like, “meet-ear” so it is no wonder others cannot understand us.

Some other words that are unintelligible if pronounced in an American accent are: tortoise (tore-toy-see, buffalo (boo-fallow), ballet (bah-let), and any word that ends with a hard “R”: gutter, robber, roar (gut-ah, row-bah, row-ah).

We may all agree that the Spanish accent is passionate and fierce, the French accent is sexy and lyrical, and the Italian accent fantastic. But there is no other accent in the world as phonetically dependent as the Kenyan English accent. And it still beats the American accent hands down.