Le Doyen: Your Accent Betrays You

I still have issues with ‘Kenyan’ English, even if I am as guilty as accused (I’m the prosecutor, the judge and the lawyer here!). You’ve heard of Kenyans who visit France for a week and come back with an American accent? African countries are known to have peculiar accents, but hey let’s give Anglophones a break here; listening to the heavily accentuated French spoken in the francophone Africa and comparing it to what would be considered as standard French will leave you wondering why we didn’t develop our native languages into one regional language in Africa(say Swahili or Yoruba).

Back to the Kenyan dialect of English, one of the distinctive features of this dialect is its multiple accents. Unlike in Britain where they are obsessed with accents given that they are native English speakers, in Kenya accents are involuntary! This is where your accent betrays you and not your name; in fact had one Kalonzo Musyoka known this he would have spared himself the ridicule of being labeled tribal. Supposedly, Kenyans should be speaking in the Received Pronunciation (RP) which is regarded to as the standard accent of Standard English, however this is not the case. One of the most sought after Kenyan linguists (and purist), Prof Okoth Okombo attributes this to our first teachers of English. His scathing remarks about them are better not quoted here. Among the most notorious sounds for Kenyans are the post-alveolar affricates /tʃ/ and /dƷ/ the post alveolar fricatives /ʃ/ and /Ʒ/ and the /r/! Those who miss the R either produce an L or a plain aahJ. If you thought the R troubles are with people from the mountains, engage the Samburu who roll their tongue when trying to utter the R. What is the letter H called? I can bet 98% of you got this wrong, H is the only letter that doesn’t have the sound it represents in its name. Don’t call it heich, it’s an eich! Our Swahili (which isn’t any better) has also taken a heavy a heavy toll on our pronunciations, especially the vowel sounds so that each of the vowels is pronounced with one standard sound. You realize English spoken out of a classroom does not recognize the existence of short and long vowel sounds and does not distinguish monophthongs, diphthongs and triphthongs.

At least everyone speaks with an accent, we can actually narrow it down to beyond where you come from. Fortunately sociolinguists are at our defence! The primary function of language is communication. If your accent doesn’t inhibit communication then it should be the last thing you should think about before you speak. But we all want to speak in a refined standard language, don’t we? Well, I personally do!

If you do, try listening to BBC, Maina Kageni will take you nowhere with his endless relationship issues if you’re seeking to learn language! Seek to speak in RP and not British English, if you seek the latter, you will end up with many other accents from the United Kingdom while the former is the queens dialect.

One of the most obvious features of RP is non-rhocity in that the R occurring at the end of a word is always silent (I bet this isn’t a problem with Kenyans). Learn the vowel sounds in English; learn that ‘a’ in certain words like bath and dance is long like that of father, that it is rather “scheewpid’’ than “stoopid” for stupid, it is “epitemy” and not “epitome” for epitome this list is endless. I can promise you this won’t be a walk in the park with a language like English whose pronunciation is very irregular and unpredictable, did I mention it is “tirany” and not “tairany” for tyranny? Learn the intonation of the language (the French are very particular on this), what is the correct intonation for statements and question? Know that produce the verb and produce the noun can only be differentiated by which syllable you stress! Learn to drop the Ts where you can in such a way that we won’t accuse you of ‘twenging’, instead block the air with your tongue at the end of the first syllable before expelling it at the beginning of the second syllable. Try practicing that with 'battle'. Suffice it to say, the only way out is by speaking, listening, living, walking and talking proper English. Oh, I almost forgot, you also need to invest, invest in a pocket dictionary!