Monday, 13 August 2007

Malawian English

Things are moving now, and after all this period of idleness I start to be fairly busy. I am going to be teaching in the premedical, lab technician and pharmacy courses. If this was not enough, I am getting used to communicate with the locals... I'll have to explain this in detail.
Malawians speak very special English. Nor that I speak better English than them, but their way of talk can be very amusing. One of the main features of their adopted English is the incorporation of vowels in the middle or end of the words. So 'health problems' become 'healthy problems', and the same applies to healthy centre, etc. another good one is blood sample, that is called 'bloody sample', dirt road, dirty road and so on.
But the difficulties don't finish here, is not only a matter of different accent or expressions. An ordinary European like me also has to deal with the fact that Malawians will always tell you what you want to hear. That means that when you ask someone to do something for you they will always say: 'yes, I'm going to do it' but obviously, they don't say when. And sometimes they cannot do it, but they will never tell you. The most negative sentence that I have heard so far is: 'I'll come back to you'.. This means, more or less, that there are serious problems.

1 comment:

Karine Armelle said...

And I've been complaining about the Indian "We're working on it", which seems to have quite the same signification as the Malawian "We will do it"....