The different accents of the provinces - HAlarious!

fish.fush.feesh.
That right there is the word " fish" spoken in what I like to call Capetownese, Durbanish and Pretorian.
You may be sitting in the chair in front of your computer or on your bed in front of your laptop right now thinking that I am crazy and just making this stuff up, but I can promise you, it is not made up!




I first noticed this accent phenomenon ( it is what it is) on a trip to Cape Town in April 2009 when some friends ,who are Cape Town born and bred, started laughing at me when I spoke. I was confused to say the least, and slightly offended. Now me, I come from Durban and I have never found the durban accent strange, but there I was, standing with a group of Capetonians who kept asking me to say the word "five" or the word "hill". For those of you who are utterly confused right now, let me enlighten you. Apparently I pronounce those words as "fahv" and "hal". Ja, I know..its awful.

Anyway, so then I told the Tonians ( its easier to type that) to pronounce the two words the way they would say them, and they proceeded to say "faieeve" and "heel". It was then my turn to laugh 'coz honestly they sounded SO snooty!

 However, my interest in these different accents led to me finding out how the Pretoria accent faired in this war of  'who could pronounce the words properly' and this is what my findings produced :

"farve" ( even worse than durbans pronounciation) and    " yill " ( what?!!)

The funniest thing is that everyone takes there accent SO seriously that they actually get offended if you tell them its wrong. On closer comparison I discovered that Capetownese has a strong Old English influence, Durbanish is at times similar to the Australian accent, and Pretorian has been affected by the dominant Afrikaans influence within there province. Therefore, none are wrong, just unique.

Although I was offended at first, I have come to realise that my accent is part of where I am from and therefore part of who I am, and I wouldn't trade it for the anything...

...except maybe a spanish accent, 'coz those are extremely cool!