In honour of my return to South Africa, I thought I would share a few of the words and phrases that baffled me on my first trip here (and second, and third... ). The obvious ones are things like ‘braai’ (barbecue), ‘robots’ (traffic lights) and ‘biltong’ (dried strips of meat, a popular snack). ‘Ya, you just turn left at the robots, past the biltong store and we’ll meet you at the braai for some snoek’ ‘Eh?’ I like to think I have adopted fairly successfully the language that is South African English. My family often make fun of my British-Yorkshire-South African accent, which is a product of non-Yorkshire parents, a Yorkshire childhood, and many months in South Africa trying to communicate with my boyfriend’s nieces and nephews who simply do not understand a word I say
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