 In Southern Africa, "muti" and cognates of "umuthi" are in widespread use in most indigenous African languages as well as in South African English and Afrikaans, which sometimes use "muti" as a slang word for medicine in general.This noun is of the " umu"/"imi" class so the singular (tree) is "umuthi" and the plural (trees) is "imithi".Since the pronunciation of the initial vowel of this class is unstressed, the singular is sometimes pronounced "muthi".