South African Lingo

South Africa has 11 official languages, including English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, and Sesotho, the five languages that make up their national anthem.  And in addition to trying to understand all the different accents, there are also some vocabulary differences that have had to be explained to me during my time here. 

Probably the most common and hilarious difference is that they call traffic lights "robots".  So you may hear the instruction "turn left at the second robot" if you are driving in South Africa.  I was warned about this before arriving though so I never had to wonder exactly what kind of robot they were talking about and why there was more than one.  Another small point about traffic lights in South Africa is that the middle colour is apparently orange, not yellow.

A South African robot

Another hilarious difference is that water heaters are called geysers (pronounced geezer).  So you may have to worry about your broken geyser, or figure out how to turn on your geyser while in South Africa.

Some of the more common differences are that fries are called chips (as are potato chips), a sink is a basin, cookies are biscuits, and the yard is the garden.  These things don't really matter, it's usually easy to tell what someone is talking about from the context... but the differences do matter when you happen to be teaching language to children with autism.  So I've had to adjust my vocabulary as well.  I've been told by the therapists that a couple of the kids' new words even sound "American" (they can't hear the difference between Canadian and American, hell I barely can).  I've tried adjusting my accent slightly when doing therapy, saying things like "banawna" for banana, and "wa-tah" for water when providing corrections and prompts so as not to confuse the kids.  I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes, but it certainly provides entertainment for the other therapists.