Postcard from Uganda: language

Greetings from Kampala, Uganda! We arrived about 10 days ago to work as visiting scholars at Makerere University, and there have been many interesting things to observe in this initial time, including some language points.

I have noticed the following systematic uses in Ugandan English that are different from Australian English, which may well be a feature of other Englishes elsewhere:

• 'pick' - instead of 'pick up', e.g. 'I called the number you gave, but no one picked, so can you call me back on Monday?' and 'I'll come and pick you around 2.30pm'.
• 'thank you too' - in response to a 'thank you', as an adjacency pair, e.g. in the supermarket when I thank the checkout person they often say this, as opposed to just 'thank you'.
• 'born-agains' - used to differentiate Christians who have been spiritually born again from 'nominal' Christians. For example, our apartment attendant asked 'are you people born-agains?' and another friend introduced us to someone else saying 'these people are born again, too'. In Australia asking 'are you people Christians' would probably get the answer she was looking for because people are less likely to identify as Christians unless they are actually believers. But a larger proportion of Ugandans would identify as Christians (statistically about 84%!), at least nominally, so the word 'Christian' doesn't have quite the same value here. It's almost the default. Hence 'born-again' is a useful alternative.
• 'done' - meaning finished, e.g. waiters/waitresses might ask 'are you done', rather than 'have you finished?' This usage also occurs in American English I think. But there is another usage, when a waiter/waitress might say 'the chicken is done', meaning there is no more. I think this meaning is less common in American English, as the expression would normally mean 'it is cooked and ready'.
• 'You are welcome' - as an elaborated form of the simple 'welcome', which is more common in Australian English. I have heard this from a wide range of people: new colleagues at the university, students, supermarket attendants (especially the friendly guys at the meat counter at the nearby supermarket), waiters/waitresses,  and people at the church we visited. I find it rather endearing and somehow more sincere than just 'welcome'.
• 'dear' - seems to be used as a generic term to address someone who might be a peer (rather than specifically as a term of endearment), e.g. the young woman who sat next to me in church on Sunday wrote me a note on her bulletin that said 'My dear, I would liked to speak to you after the service', and a colleague replied to a line in an email I sent with 'thank you dear'.
• 'what': in a number of teaching contexts (church sermon, Bible study group, introductory linguistics lecture), I have heard the teachers/leaders using a construction in which they use 'what' in a sentence to prompt the hearers to supply the word they are about to say (at least internally). An example (loosely based on a lecture I attended this morning) would be something like 'Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words. We say that words have one or more morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful units of words. For example the word 'students' has two meaningful units: 'student' and 's'. So we say it has two - what? - morphemes.' The construction has a particular prosodic and intonational pattern - there is a slight pause before the 'what' and and a slight rising intonation on 'what' followed by falling intonation on the rest of the clause (which is usually just one key word or phrase that the teacher wants to emphasise).
• etc: On a number of occasions I've heard teachers (and some others not in a teaching role) use 'etc' to indicate that they are providing an incomplete list. But instead of saying 'etcetera', they say 'e. t. c', i.e. spelling out the abbreviation.

Hopefully I will discover more as we go along!