So, in Malawi, there's this interesting thing that happens with Rs and Ls where they tend to get swapped. So when I was walking in the market with my dear friend Calorine, we came across this awesome chip shop.
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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This is an unnecessary nerd dump, but the letter R is probably the most unique letter in English. Especially in regions like the States where we pronounce it like a vowel (no sound stop with tongue or lips) instead of a consonant. In some languages (like Spanish) it's treated with a soft palate touch, like tt in "butter" (said the American way). In other languages it's similar. Take Korean for instance, where R and L are actually the same consonant: ㄹ. We're used to our unique treatment of R, but for many languages it's not any different from L. So confusions like this while they seem kind of silly, they make perfect sense for the target language - including Hawaiian.
Some cursory research shows Malawi's national language (Chichewa) has R and it's pronounced similar to the Spanish R, and they have a separate letter for L, which is pronounced like the English.
Chichewa speakers were the people having trouble distinguishing the two when I was there, at least when it comes to words from other languages. I know that they can pronounce both R and L, they just often swapped the sounds
Interesting, I wonder if they're interchangeable then. In Tagalog (and probably other Filipino languages), d morphs to r when conjugated, and people are inconsistent in practice about that. I wonder if Chichewa has something similar, but with r and l.
That's interesting. I do see that 16 languages are spoken there, 6 being distinct. English being "official" (though that may be thanks to colonization). On the one hand I want to give the shop owner the benefit of the doubt because it is possible one of their native languages has the R L phenomenon. Or they're avoiding lawsuits by changing the name. Or... it's just a goof. 🤷♂️
Probably just a goof.
I'm not very familiar with African languages, but other areas with broad language diversity (Philippines, India) tend to have very similar phonology across regional languages since they tend to be in the same language family.