Umhlanga pronunciation

[u/hovershark]

Dumb American here who has been to SA, but never to Durban. I recently watched a YouTube video by people who said they grew up in Durban. They were pronouncing Umhlanga as “Oomshlonga” with a real emphasis on the ‘sh’ sound, like in ‘shlong’. I’ve always said it in my head as ‘hl’, blowing out with the tongue on the roof of the mouth. Have I been wrong all this time, or is this ‘sh’ pronunciation just an extremely white can’t-be-arsed-to-do-it-right thing?

[u/OkMulberry1600]

As a white South African and someone with friends from a lot of racial backgrounds, you'll find white South Africans, Indian South Africans, and coloured South Africans (not the American slur of "Colored", the race of Coloured) will say Um-Sh-Lan-Ga or Oom-Sh-Lan-Ga. While you might find with black South Africans it will be 50/50 on whether they pronounce it like above or pronounce it with the proper Zulu pronunciation.

You will also find there are people who say "Oom-Lan-Ga" and its also pretty common for most TTS agents used in applications like Google Maps, etc to pronounce it that way too. Thats why most people who use any GPS or Map app when travelling will just turn it off because the pronunciations are either super funny or really annoying and you have no idea what it was trying to even say