Rooibos Pronunciation

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Matt from Spokane, Washington.

Hi, Matt. Welcome to the program. What’s up?

Okay, so I have been getting into a steady tea habit, started drinking tea in the mornings and the evenings, and then had the trouble that, you know, drinking tea in the evening makes it hard to go to sleep.

So looking around, I found out about this different kind of tea leaf that has little to no caffeine, and I have not been able to figure out how to pronounce it.

So the first time I saw it, it’s spelled R-O-O. Oh, I don’t know if I can spell anymore. R-O-O-I-B-O-S. I called it Roybos. And immediately the first person to hear me say it smirked me like, that’s not how you say it.

Well, how did they say it? Really? Well, I can’t remember how they said it. What I know is the most recent tea shop that I bought it from, he says Roybos and claims that’s the way to say it.

I, you know, did my duty and looked at YouTube and every YouTube video had a different way of pronouncing it. So I was curious, how do you pronounce it? But also, like, where does that word come from? Where does the tea come from?

Oh, both excellent questions. So this is a red tea, right? A red herbal tea? Correct. R-O-O-I-B-O-S. What do you think, Martha?

Well, yeah, I think your pronunciation is pretty darn close. The one that I see most often is rooibos. And the reason that it looks so strange is that it comes from Africans, from the language of South Africa. And it translates literally as red bush because it comes from, this tea comes from a plant that looks like a red bush. And sometimes it’s actually called red bush tea.

So you could always spring that one on the guy. Yeah, I love it. Say you want some red bush tea. It’s also sometimes called red tea or just bush tea, but rooibos is the…

So the person in charge of me, if his name is Roy, I would say rooibos, rooibos. Roughly, yeah. Okay. Yeah, you could curry favor with him by bringing him some rooibos tea.

So in Afrikaans, it’s just a little different than the English version, like the North American English version. That last syllable is just a little more clipped and the r is almost trilled so it’s like rooibos. Something like that but we don’t need to do that but just so you know no no okay okay excellent I can drink it and say it now.

Yeah, yeah, it’s fantastic right? It’s good tea. I had it first in the Virgin Islands like a long time ago, like almost 30 years ago, and I remember having this bush tea and going to this one shop. And I loved it. I loved it. And she made it from the raw materials, not tea bags. It was fantastic.

No, right. So I’m doing a kind of a chai variation, steeping it in milk, boiling it, and then straining it. And it’s delicious. It’s addictive. Without the caffeine. Sounds fantastic.

Well, Matt, thank you for your call. Take care. Thank you. All right. Bye-bye. Bye.

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