Intonation for South African Accents for Actors

When I’m coaching actors on a South African accent, it's actually very complicated because you're not only dealing with South African English, but then you're also potentially dealing with English as a Second Language speakers.

Learning South African Accent Variations

You can have speakers whose home language is English - South African English. In addition, many South Africans speak a wide variety of other languages.

Afrikaans is the language spoken by many South Africans who are related to Dutch settles or are even just influenced by Afrikaners because of where they live.

There are also numerous other languages, largely spoken by black South Africans, including Xhosa, Sotho, Zulu, and many others.

These English as a Second Language speakers are targeting speaking English with an SAE (South African English) accent, so you have their English is filtered through their home language(s), and aiming for SAE.

Figuring out this specific configuration of influences is basically your first job, when working on a South African accent - though I'd suggest your best start is learning SAE, and then focusing on how the home language influences how you speak English.

Plucking Intonation

The intonation I'm diving into in the video above is the plucking intonation that occurs in many accents, including many Spanish accents, such as Castilian Spanish accents, as well as Welsh accents, Norwegian accents, and even RP or Standard British accents.

In working on this plucking intonation for South Africa, it's helpful to start with Afrikaans speakers, as the plucking tends to be the strongest for these speakers, though it's also present in a milder form for native SAE speaker.

When you're an actor learning any accent, I encourage you to physicalize the intonation, and to always start with a really strong version. In the video above, I demonstrate this sort plucking quality, almost like I'm plucking a feather or plucking a hair.

This plucking action is a quality that's present in a South African English accent, in addition to an even stronger plucking quality of an Afrikaans accent. Again, I am always going a little over the top initially, and I suggest you do the same. You want to start super strong, with almost a cartoon quality, so that then you can always mellow it out. But starting with this extremely strong sort of pluck that you can do with this Afrikaans accent, then you can lighten this up as needed.

Intonation Affects Aspiration

This plucking quality means that a T sound may almost sound like a D. "Take" may sound a bit like "dike" in this accent. "Tell" is like "dell." "Time" is like "dime."

Again, the pluck isn't that strong in a native South African English accent most of the time, but start there, and then lighten it up as needed.

This is a key to intonation in ANY accent - along with physicalizing the action.

This plucking is not only a part of the rhythm or intonation of this accent - it's also a part of what affects this reduction in aspiration.

Actors can learn these South African accents and over 50 others through the tutorials for accents at AccentHelp.com. Each set of materials includes written and audio materials for learning the accent, and there are thousands of native speaker recordings included as well. And every time I update the materials, you get the updated version for free!