South African English
The term South African English is applied to the first-language dialects of English spoken by South Africans, with the L1 English variety spoken by Zimbabweans, Zambians and Namibians, being recognised as offshoots.
There is some social and regional variation within South African English. Social variation within South African English has been classified into three groupings:[2] Cultivated, closely approximating Received Pronunciation and associated with upper class; General, a social indicator of the middle class, and Broad, associated with the working class and/or Afrikaans descent, and closely approximating the second-language Afrikaans-English variety. This is similar to the case in Australian English.
Features involving consonants include the tendency for voiceless plosives to be unaspirated in stressed word-initial environments, [tj] tune and [dj] dune tend to be realised as [tʃ] and [dʒ] respectively .
Vowels
/i/ as in kit is split between the realisations [i] and [i:] in General, and [i] and [iə] in Broad.
A slightly raised [æ] is the usual realisation for /æ/ (as in trap) in Cultivated and General. In Broad varieties, it is often raised to [ε], so that /æ/ encroaches on /ε / for some speakers. A good example of this is South Africa sounds more like South Efrica.
/o/ (as in lot) ranges from [o] to [a]. There is a tendency towards [a] in younger Cape Town and Natal speakers of General SAE.
Words like cure are usually realised as diphthongal [uə] in Cultivated and General; but there is a growing trend, especially when the vowel does not occur after /j/ (sure), in General towards Broad's monophthongal [o:]. The unstressed (or secondarily stressed) vowel at the end of words like happy is usually a half-long [i.].
The unstressed vowel at the end of words like letter is realised as [ə] in all varieties.
The unstressed vowel at the end of words like comma is usually [ə].
Consonants
/p, b, t, d, k, g/ The voiced and voiceless plosives are distinctive in South African English, and voiceless plosives are generally unaspirated in all positions in Broad South African English, serving as a marker for this subvariety. Other varieties aspirate a voiceless plosive before a stressed syllable. The contrast is neutralised in Broad.
/f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʒ, ʃ, x, h/ South African English is one of the very few varieties to have a velar fricative phoneme /x/, but this is only in words borrowed from Afrikaans (e.g. gogga [xoxə] 'insect'), Khoisan (e.g. Gamtoos, the name of a river), Scots (e.g. loch) and German (e.g. Bach). Many speakers use the Afrikaans voiceless uvular fricative [χ] rather than the velar.
The tendency for /θ/ to be realised as [f] is a stereotypical Broad feature, but is more accurately associated with Afrikaans English.
As in many varieties of English, word-final /v, ð, z, ʒ/ are usually voiceless, and are distinguished only by the length of the preceding vowel.
In Broad and some General SAE varieties, /j/ strengthens to [γ] before a high front vowel: yield [γi:ld].
Some (particularly older) Cultivated speakers retain a distinction between /w/ and /hw/ (wine–whine merger), but this distinction is absent from General and Broad, which has merged both to [w].