Ikalanga newscast must un-corrupt place names...

 It would take a lifetime to try and change place names back to their original Kalanga language form. Indeed the exercise is neither practicable nor desirable, because to the inhabitants of those places, the corrupted versions of the names are what now makes sense.

However, now that we have news read in Kalanga here at home, we Kalanga speakers feel bombarded by constant mispronunciation of place names. Take the name “Molepolole” for example, which is a sprawling village/city some fifty kilometres west of our capital city, Gaborone. I put it to the news writers that if they ask an old (and I mean old) person in that village, what the name of the village is, the answer will be “Mulipulule”, which is the Kalanga pronunciation. The question now is: in reading the name “Molepolole” during Kalanga news cast, which pronunciation should be presented to listeners? Should Kalanga news writers not make an effort to do just a little research on the correct (Kalanga) pronunciation before giving us the corrupted versions?

It is a fact that nearly ALL place names are in Kalanga albeit corrupted, in our country. Yesterday I listened to the Botswana television (Btv) news in the Naro language. I don’t understand Naro, though. Something was taking place at a village named “Ikongwe”. I immediately suspected that the correct name of the village is “Ikungwe”, a Kalanga word meaning an iron hoe that one uses for soil tilling. When the Kalanga newscast finally came I was right – an iron ore mine was at issue. The “newly discovered” iron ore was in fact mined there when the people still spoke Kalanga. Now they are classified as Tswana speaking, of course. When the Kalanga newsreader pronounced the village name as “Ikongwe” it sounded bizarre, to say the least.

I accept that the way we write Kalanga is itself a problem nowadays. For example, the “ng” in the two words “takongwa”, meaning “we did not succeed” and “ikungwe”, meaning “an iron hoe” is pronounced differently in either word. In the first word the “ng” is silent, as in “sing”, while in the second word, the “ng” is as in “Angola”. These are challenges that Kalanga news writers have to overcome. The more immediate task though is to write the correct version of place names when presenting Kalanga news in Botswana. All one has to do is to ask the old people at any given place!


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