The Use of Slang: Zimbabwe

They are typically restricted to a particular context or group of people. So if a person was a tech savvy guy, then he would call a Hard Disk Drive a HDD, so would be like “pass me the HDD”. Typically slang begins as a sort of encrypted “tech-savvy for subcultures, the criminal underground is an often used example of this. Many drug nicknames are used so that members of the subculture can talk without being understood by people outside of their group. One example is cocaine: people call it “coke” so it sounds like the soft-drink people have during a hot day. Subcultures often create terms to describe things that mainstream society does not have words for, or does not have words conveying specific enough meanings for. The term “baby mama” is an example of this. Based on Jamaican culture, this word implies the mother of someone’s child who is no longer tied to the father of that child. Most slang words and phrases are not true neologism; they are not completely new and unique words (though that does happen on occasion). They are old words given new meanings. For example, the term “Swag” was the term for a group of homosexual people, but now it is a verb and it tells us about a person’s appearance, style, or the way he or she presents themselves. The process of diffusion also creates evolutionary pressures on slangs much like other language attributes. As slang diffuses through culture, it often starts to lose some sharpness of meaning, and when it does new slang is needed and generally created by the subgroup that started the slang in the first place. “Swag” is an example of this as much mainstream usage of the term does not imply the disconnectedness of the parents that the original meaning of the phrase did. This selection and renewal process also happens because as it becomes accepted in the mainstream, slang loses its encryption and social-identification features.

Subcultures often create terms to describe things that mainstream society does not have words for, or does not have words conveying specific enough meanings for. The term “baby mama” is an example of this. Based on Jamaican culture, this word implies the mother of someone’s child who is no longer tied to the father of that child. Most slang words and phrases are not true neologism; they are not completely new and unique words (though that does happen on occasion). They are old words given new meanings. For example, the term “Swag” was the term for a group of homosexual people, but now it is a verb and it tells us about a person’s appearance, style, or the way he or she presents themselves. The process of diffusion also creates evolutionary pressures on slangs much like other language attributes. As slang diffuses through culture, it often starts to lose some sharpness of meaning, and when it does new slang is needed and generally created by the subgroup that started the slang in the first place. “Swag” is an example of this as much mainstream usage of the term does not imply the disconnectedness of the parents that the original meaning of the phrase did. This selection and renewal process also happens because as it becomes accepted in the mainstream, slang loses its encryption and social-identification features.

I have travelled and lived in numerous countries, I have come across a variety of slang, but Zimbabwean slang is the most interesting and creative slang I have heard so far. In Zimbabwe, as there are a number of languages spoken, there are some influences on the slang used in English. Zimbabwean Slang is a combination of English and Afrikaans words. One of the words that was taken from Afrikaans language was “essing”. Essing is a words that is used when a person is in doomed or in deep trouble. A situation where this word would be used would be when you have a lot of homework and you being a procrastinator keeps it all for Sunday night and when you aren’t able to finish all your homework, you could say the you are “essing” as you are in distress. The word “essing” came from the Afrikaans language and it literal translation is “on fire”. It also makes sense as a person on fire is technically in trouble as they could die. Now a days, people are creating slang words by saying the backwards. For example, Zimbabweans say ‘gwas’ instead of ‘swag’, the slang ‘swag’ has become so mainstream in society that people have to create a slang out of another slang so it becomes their jargon again. Another example is food, Zimbabweans call food; ‘doof’, so basically now days people are not getting creative rather they are just taking ordinary words that are spoken in society and saying them backwards. An interesting Zimbabwean slang is ‘finah’ which translates to enough. ‘Finah’ sounds similar to finish which is a distant synonym to enough. The Zimbabweans replaced the ‘s’ in Finish with ‘a’ to form ‘finah’.

Neverthless, slang itself is very confusing as people use ordinary words to create their own meanings for them. As a person who has travelled to a lot of places, I found Zimbabwean slang to be the most confusing of all of them. An example of a confusing slang terms is ‘panning’. ‘Panning’ translates to what’s up, so if a person says ‘what’s panning’, they are asking how are you or what’s up. Now, for a person who is new to Zimbabwean slang, the sentence threw me off completely and I didn’t have a single clue on what the person was asking me. The first thing that came to my mind was a pan, then since panning was a camera shot that shows you the scene the movie is based on, I was bewildered about what the person was asking me. Later on I came to know it meant what’s up. There are many more words that threw me off, another one was ‘bleak’. ‘Bleak’ is the Zimbabwean slang term for mad, so if someone says they are ‘bleak’ at you, you better be prepared to run because they are mad at you. In English, bleak is the name of a  small silvery shoaling fish of the minnow family, found in Eurasian rivers. This is one of the slang terms that make you laugh if you don’t know what it actually means, which could also be very dangerous at the same time. For instance, a person is mad  and he uses the term ‘bleak’ in his sentence, “I am bleak”, now you don’t know what the term means so you start laughing as the person just said that he is a silver fish. In the perspective of the person who used the slang term, the person is not happy about you laughing at his misfortune and the person gets angry at you and shouts at you and by the end you have made an enemy. This all happened because you got confused with the term ‘bleak’. Zimbabwean slang can lead you into trouble if you don’t know what the person is saying.

Written by Vignesh Mahesh