Excuse my accent, I speak English like an Englishman speaks my language

Every now and then and often during the most inopportune time, my tongue will slip and I will speak English with a Nilotic twist. I will trip over the letter “s” and “dose” will become “dodge” or “such” become “church”.

Whenever this happens, I remember with good humour and comfort what South African comedian Trevor Noah once said about people who speak English with an accent. He said that whenever a person speaks English (and by extension any other language) with an accent, it does not imply a lack of intelligence, as is often perceived of people who do not speak English “properly”. Rather, it implies that they are speaking English but with the grammatical rules of their own language.

An example are the Luo people, of whom I am one. This Nilotic crop of peoples descended from South Sudan’s Bahr-al-Ghazaal speak languages composed of words that do not have the sounds “s” “h” “x” “v” and others in them. They therefore find it incredibly difficult to pronounce words with those sounds, particularly the sound “s” with all its variants such as the “sh” sound in words like “ship”, or the soft “j” sound as can be heard from the word “genre” or in the French word “bonjour”.

These are the linguistic roots that trip me every now and then, and the grammatical rules that Trevor Noah was talking about when he made that fitting remark about accents.

In Buganda, in Central Uganda, the struggle is in pronouncing words with the sounds “r” and “l”, often having them interchanged in a manner that seems haphazard to the person who does not know which grammatical rule of Luganda (the language of the Baganda), the speaker is following.

The other day, for example, a mechanic while he spoke to me, told me about a car that he continually referred to- and what I heard as- a Toyota “Lactice”. It is when I went to Google to check it out that the search engine intuited that I was, in fact, looking for a Toyota “Ractis”.

So, which grammatical rule for Luganda was being transposed over the English language here?

It is the rule that in Luganda, the letters “r” and “l” represent the same sound, but that change depending on the surrounding sounds. For example, if the sound begins a word, then it is pronounced as “l” because the rule is that the letter “r” never begins a word. Hence “Lactis” and not “Ractis”, as the mechanic said.

Secondly, the positioning relative to the vowel letters (and sounds) “i” and “e” also matter. When the vowels “i” and “e” come first, then “r” follows. When any other vowel comes first, then “l” follows. That’s why you will hear an “r” somewhere in the phrase “I love you” even when there is obviously no “r” in there; The proceeding of the letter “l” in the word “love” after “i” is what causes the “r” sound to emerge.

Yet, in the phrase “You love me” the “l” will be articulated very clearly for the reason that there is neither “e” nor “i” preceeding the letter “l” in the word “love” to change it.

I will end with this delightful quote that I cannot remember where I saw it from:

“I speak English the way a white person speaks my language” 🙌🏾 🩷