Dictionary of South African English

In March 2025 DSAE published a revised online edition of its open-access historical dictionary of the South African variety of English. This edition, two years in the making, features an updated visual design for both Mobile and Desktop platforms and introduces the new dictionary logo featuring the protea, South Africa’s iconic national flower.

A major content update in this edition is the new audio pronunciation feature. While the dictionary retains phonetic transcriptions, you can now click to play over 3900 recordings of South African English words including alternative pronunciations. These studio recordings, created using authentic South African English speakers, represent an unparalleled phonetic dataset available for the first time.

Aside from changes to existing entries, over 100 new words have been added across a range of domains, including: Sport (shibobo, diski), Law (Aquilian liability), Music (amahubo, boereqanga), Politics and History (the struggle, struggle credentials), Food and Drink (magwinya, walkie talkies, papsak) and Cultural terms (boerewors curtain). Words reflecting everyday life in South Africa have also been added to the dictionary’s three centuries of regional usage (load shedding, mjondolo, ekasi), plus historically recent colloquialisms such as fong kong, makoya, eish, and tsek.

Following a design phase which transformed a compressed printed dictionary text into a layered, graphical Web Application for multiple platforms, the current Corrected Edition was published in March 2023. (Read more about our previous dictionary releases.) Design and usability imperatives having been met, the current edition introduces content updates across a 1.5-million-word dictionary text.

Terms originally flagged as unassimilated into South African English (igqira, tata) now reflect as current usage based on updated linguistic evidence. Language names which had changed in the post-democracy officialisation of South African languages (Zulu to IsiZulu, Tswana to Setswana) now display as such.

In addition to updates to pronunciations, place names across the dictionary now reflect official names disseminated by the South African Geographical Names Council, e.g. Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, South Africa), the home of the Dictionary of South African English.

The South African English word smallanyana was first recorded in 2016 in a New York interview with the former South African Minister of Social Development, Bathabile Dlamini. In the interview she famously suggested that many politicians had “smallanyana skeletons” in their closets. In late 2022 the word resurfaced in popular media in the context of allegations of state corruption. The adjective combines English small and the diminutive suffix -nyana (‘little’, ‘a small portion of something’), producing the meaning ‘a tiny little’ (skeleton). The suffix -nyana was first recorded in the Dictionary of South African English in 1968 under the word nipinyana, denoting a small measure or ‘nip’ of an alcoholic beverage, a term which is still current in South African English.

In similarly informal contexts, some South Africans playfully use the diminutive connotations of nyana as a noun to downplay a perceived vice, e.g. “two nyana” meaning two alcoholic drinks. Others attempt no mitigation of their consumption and refer to their tipple simply as a dop (see sense 3).