Living in a Multilingual World (The One About the Royal Wedding)

What is her name? I stressed the “her” as much as I could but my pre-entry ESOL students’ faces remained blank as they stared at a picture of Meghan Markle.

Like many people in the UK I had bought into the whole royal wedding shebang and planned a lesson around the Windsors and the Markles. In this case, the focus would be on introductions, a subject we had covered previously but to which I wanted to come back using the royal shindig as class material. I was really pleased with myself and the fact my lesson would be as student-led as possible. The lead-in would be a photo of the happy couple, Meghan and Harry, the hand-over to students would be swift and smooth and the practice stage productive. There was one element, however, I didn’t count on.

My learners did not know much about the royals.

There it was on the wall, the family tree diagram I had so carefully printed off the net showing the lineage from Queen Elizabeth II to the latest addition, Prince Louis. Yet, my students, spanning continents from Asia to America, and countries from Pakistan to Ecuador, only recognised William. I panicked in the same way a theatre director panics when their leading actor or actress falls ill on opening night and their understudy has lost their voice. What to do now?

Well, time for some improvisation – having been part of an impro troupe back in my uni days, I developed then very handy skills that have served me well over the years. For instance, how to turn a potentially failing lesson into a successful one with a simple sleight of hand and some thespian tricks – and concept checking questions. Is the woman’s name William? No, it isn’t (well, even Harry would have been surprised at that one!). Is her name Elizabeth II? (they knew who the Queen was) No, it isn’t and I for one can’t see the newly-minted Duchess of Sussex applying for the top job anytime soon.

Next it was a controlled practice activity. I chose a multiple-choice question with just one correct answer. Is the woman’s name a) Elizabeth II b)Meghan Markle c)William?

They all called out at the same time, in different accents and using various pronunciations: Meghan Markle! I carried on playing devil’s advocate for a few seconds, broad smile on my face. So, it’s not Elizabeth II (no). And it’s not William (no).

No, it is not, I said. Or no, it isn’t. I decided to throw in a bit of language feedback to ensure that their answers, whilst correct, still included the full structure.

First hurdle overcome I grew in confidence. I moved on to the productive stage. I normally use puppets in my lessons as ice-breakers and to make them more fun and entertaining. Also, to bring the child in us back out. William. Elizabeth and Meghan lost their titles and became plain Bill, Liz and Meg, a cat, a dog and a bear. Introductions were practised. Then, the new content was presented: This is my friend…His/Her name is… My learners took to it pretty well. Even the usually shy ones in the room contributed actively. My personal aim of maintaining a good pace and giving out clearer instructions was working.

Still in the productive and final stage, I marched on. Here is where most beginners’ level teachers stumble. Learners can easily get used to the teacher doing all the work whilst they only answer controlled practice exercises. Their attitude at times can come across as uncooperative. Yet, all they are doing is showing their lack of knowledge of the target language and their insecurity in acquiring said language. No wonder they refuse to leave their comfort zone. Hence the quick hand-over at the start of the lesson ensures both parties know what is expected of them. In my case, I had made up little cards, each with a (very) short bio of Harry, Meghan, William and Kate. After reading them, the students were expected to role-play between themselves.

Up stood the first two, a man and a woman. After the usual hellos, the introductions:

 My name is Henry Charles Albert David, but you can call me Harry, what is your name?

My name is Meghan Markle. Nice to meet you.

-         Nice to meet you, too. Where are you from?

-         I am from the United States of America. And you, where are you from?

-         I am from Great Britain.

-         OK, bye.

-         Bye.

We all clapped the pair and ended the lesson there on a high. I am sure that some of them went home desperate to show off to their family what they had learnt in class and what to answer if they were ever asked “What is her name?”, a picture of a beaming Meghan Markle in hand.

© 2018

Living in a Multilingual World (The One About Adjectives and their Order)

Read the two sentences below and tell me which is the correct one:

He is an ugly little fellow.

He is a little ugly fellow.

You guessed right. The first one is the correct one. That is, if we are to go by a paragraph, gone viral last autumn, from a book called The Elements of Eloquence. The extract dealt chiefly with the order in which adjectives in English should appear (only applicable if you’re using more than one adjective per noun): opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. That is why “ugly” (my opinion), comes before “little” (size).

But I bet that you, native English speaker, knew that without bothering to read the why. That is because you “felt” it was the right way. It is a strange phenomenon, this “feeling”. I began to experience it when I started to think in English halfway through my uni years.

This is a life-changing event that does not announce itself. I am not exaggerating with the life bit. Just think of someone having to translate internally every single word and phrase that is said in a conversation before voicing them. It would be exhausting. The way the mind goes from translation-based communication to a native-speaker-level, sentence-building mindset is almost magical. It just happens. One minute you are consulting your grammar book, the next you “feel” that this is the way these adjectives ought to be arranged if you want your sentence to make sense.

Ugly or little? Which one comes first?

English is not a language famous for its rules, yet, there are plenty. The fact that not many people care about enforcing them doesn’t mean that we should ignore them. For instance, I would never think of placing and adjective after a noun in English, the way we generally do in Spanish and other romance languages (in the case of English, since it is a Germanic lexicon, the adjective+noun structure makes sense). It is just a rule we learn by rote and apply it without any second thoughts.

I am not aware that adjectives in Spanish must be ranked following a pre-arranged order. The sentence above could well be “Él es un hombre feo y pequeño” or “Él es un hombre pequeño y feo” (notice the conjunction “y” [and]. That’s another difference between the two languages). Perhaps there is a similar rule that I have not yet discovered but I doubt it. We have far too many linguistic precepts to deal with already to even contemplate adding a new one.

Without blowing my own trumpet, I am pretty sure that I have, unconsciously, placed adjectives in the correct order most of the time since I became a fluent English speaker. But it is always gratifying when we are validated by hitherto unknown laws of grammar or syntax.

© 2017

Next Post: “Thoughts in Progress”, to be published on Saturday 6^th May at 6pm (GMT)

Living in a Multilingual World (The One About Socially Awkward Linguistic Situations)

Learning a foreign language is not just about skills and dedication; it is also about context. Determining one’s context is as important as decoding complex grammar structures or incomprehensible syntax. I learnt this lesson the hard way as a newly-graduate English language teacher more than twenty years ago. There I was, fresh from uni, talking about phonetics and phonology to my students, when all some of them were interested in was to find out how to say “your rent-car is ready, sir”.

It is this contextual aspect that came to mind recently when I read the now-customary section in The Economist called “Johnson”. This was a regular feature years ago that has made a much-desired come-back.

The phases one goes through foreign-language-learning are not dissimilar to the ones one undergoes when taking the first steps in one’s native tongue. There is much to decipher, digest and interpret. The difference is that when presented with a vessel of new words the foreign-language learner will immediately hang on to primary meanings. They are the equivalent of a life-saving piece of wood in a shipwreck.

It takes a while for second-, third- and multiple-meanings of a word to take hold. I always knew that “baby” was an infant or very young child. But the “baby” who just cares for Nina Simone is of a different variety. Same with the “baby” whom (repeatedly) Robert Plant is gonna leave in Led Zeppelin’s monster hit. That baby had nothing to do with youth (even if she was young).

Thus, from primary-meaning acquisition the learner moves to a nuanced zone where the context defines the meaning of the word. We, those of us who have studied a foreign language, begin to think in that target lingo. It happened tome halfway through uni and it is one of the reasons why I am able to write a blog in English despite the fact I am a native Spanish-speaker. At some point, through hard work and skills-building, I managed to create a personal structure based on the English syntax, semantics and grammar.

I mentioned semantics in that paragraph. Semantics can be misleading sometimes. When we are learning a foreign language we not only adapt to unusual patterns (and make them familiar to us) but also we adopt linguistic tics in the same way a native speaker would. How many times have I not heard a fellow Cuban nowadays start a sentence with the word “like”, just like a US or – come to think of it – a British teenager?

In the same way, we, non-native speakers, sometimes appropriate language we rarely give a second thought to. Some of this language could come across as socially awkward. The Economist’s “Johnson” section had a wide selection of words that describe men and women but that tend to favour mainly the former over the latter. For instance, I am guilty as charged of using the word “chatty” for women whilst for men is, “says a lot”. I used to use the word “bossy” to describe a woman I knew until I realised that I was unconsciously patronising her and boxing her in. It also works the other way around. I have been called “articulate” on a few occasions, which used to bring a smile to my face until I noticed that it was usually accompanied by a look of surprise on my interlocutor’s face. At a higher level, our Prime Minister, David Cameron, used a put-down in Parliament a few years ago that no one has forgotten about. In addressing a female colleague, he told her to “calm down, dear”. Well, at least, I have the excuse of being a foreign-born non-native speaker. Oxford-based Cameron has no such excuse. He knew exactly what he was doing.

Who are you calling bossy?

Which brings me back to the start of this column tonight. Learning a foreign language does not depend on innate skills (believe me, I was not born with an MFL gene), but on hard work and dedication. It also depends on the context the learner decides for themselves. Is it communication they are after? Is it specialist translation they need? Is it the whole shebang? In more than twenty years I still have not found the answer. I’m still learning.

© 2016

Next Post: “Urban Diary”, to be published on Friday 26th February at 6pm (GMT)

Living in a Multilingual World (The One About "Correct" English)

It don’t ma’er coz it ain’t about being rich or poor, innit?

I had to resist the temptation to correct the speaker on the spot. Also, if I did, which I did in the end, by the way, where would I start? Would it be the “it don’t” howler? Or the typical London-accented “ma’er”? “Coz”, perhaps? Or, “innit”, again, a Cockney-influenced linguistic prop commonly used by the villagers of Londontown? In the end I just corrected the “it don’t” and the “innit”. Couldn’t be arsed to deal with the rest.

And that’s English for you, my dears.

Where do the boundaries of what is considered “good” English start? Where do they end? This was the subject of a recent, fascinating debate in the pages of Prospect magazine between Simon Heffer, author of Strictly English: The Correct Way toWrite and Oliver Kamm, who recently penned Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage.

Enough to give a pedant a heart attack

I could write another hundred posts like this, a thousand articles, a million words and the message will always be the same: as a non-native speaker, I am truly mesmerised by the seriousness with which the English language is taken. I was never surprised about finding linguistic pedants in my own native Spanish. Nor was I to find them in French, too, when I began to study the language. Both Spanish and French have academies that act as the guardians of the language. Compared to both, English was a breath of fresh air.

How wrong I was. From slamming miscreants who violate the rule that dictates that pronouns change their case when they follow prepositions to indulging in the peccadillo of fused participles, the English language (or at least its defenders) can sometimes come across as modern inquisitors.

Heffer makes a good point about correct English being the standard from which most dialects are derived. It is true that if you do not have a word like “father”, it is unlikely you will come up with its patois equivalent “fadda”. On the other hand, Oliver’s riposte that the problem is not English grammar but the constant, obsessive linguistic nit-picking, is the type of argument with which I totally agree.

Where I think both columnists fail miserably is in not moving their debate beyond the narrow confines of language. Not everyone who uses slang, or falls into the trap of the grocer’s apostrophe is an illiterate person. Social, historical, economic and even political elements come into play in daily parlance. If you were born in one of Britain’s former colonies, your patois might be a way to defy the old, imperial status quo. If you feel that society is out to get you, language becomes a barrier with which to defend yourself. The wall you build around you or the trench you dig to duck in is made of words that only you and a select group of people will be able to understand. In that case pedants will become ammunition for your cause.

To be sure, there are various shades of grey in this discussion and I find myself siding slightly with Mr Kamm rather than with The Heffza. Parents, teachers and society in general must act together to teach our younger generation the context in which they can use a particular phrase and when it is better to default to Standard English. Replacing “they’re” with “their”, “would have” with “would of” and “you’re” with “your” is grammatically incorrect. Same with “don’t” in the third person singular. We live in a world where the job market has shrunk considerably in the last seven years. It would be irresponsible and plainly idiotic for a young person to deny themselves the opportunity to break into that market just because they can’t be bothered to switch to Standard English. At the same time there is a time and place for “ma’er” (“matter”, but with a London accent) and “innit”. In my opinion, these are not mistakes but identity markers.

Knowing when to use one and not the other is one of the most valuable lessons I have learnt in my life. Not just in English but also in Spanish. We, Cubans, have a reputation in the Hispanic world for being hard to understand, given our proclivity for chopping off the end of words (especially those ending in “s” and “r”) and leaving sentences unfinished. Taking into consideration that this contravenes the rules laid down by the “holier-than-thou” Royal Spanish Academy, I should be on Oliver’s side, wearing my linguistic rebelliousness on my sleeve. Yet, I am also very practical. Nail that job first, son, and then go back to your natural, linguistic, niche, aw'ight mate?

© 2015

Next Post: “Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On", to be published on Saturday 7^th March at 6pm (GMT)

Living in a Multilingual World (The One About the Chinese and the English Language)

Surrender your weapons, my dear Chinese brethren and sisters. Your linguistic ones, I mean. Resistance is futile. Look, just a few months ago, I was waxing lyrical about the Spanish language and the way it was going to take over the US on this very forum. That time will come, I’m sure. But I might have overstated a tad bit the “when”.

As it turns out you, me ol' Sino chinas (did you see what I did there? If you’re from London or are familiar with Cockney rhyming slang you’ll understand), have gone the same way the rest of the world has gone for the last seventy or eighty years. Down the Anglicised rabbit-hole. And with no chance of leaving that mad hatter’s party. You can have a stab at answering the riddle “why is a raven like a writing desk?” but you will nevar (sic) be able to come up with the goods. Because, guess what, they will be in English.

According to a recent article in The Economist Chinese language purists are trying to keep the evil influence of the English lexicon out. Ha, good luck with that! Funny, isn’t it? Mao exterminated millions through famine and his so-called “cultural” revolution (very little if anything of the former but plenty of the latter). Last week we commemorated the 25^th anniversary of the massacre in Tiannamen Square and the hundreds, if not thousands, who were murdered there. All these events and the way they look to the outside world should worry the business-conscious, modern China more and yet the threat to the socialist state comes, not from reform-minded students, but from a Germanic language whose most famous icon is a 16^th century-born playwright, poet and actor. Even Shakespeare couldn’t have made it up.

The irony of the tirade in China's state-run People’s Daily against words such as “MBA”, “CEO” and “iPhone”, the examples given in the article, is that it fails to take into account the rapid economic growth China has undertaken in the last ten or twelve years and its consequences. This development has come at a cost. The more a country opens itself up to investment (whether it is state-sponsored capitalism or sweatshops) the bigger the risk of its losing some aspects of its culture. I know that from my own experience. Back when I used to live in Cuba there were people who adopted an accent that was half Cuban, half American just to impress and sound more knowledgeable, worldly and important. In reality they sounded like fakes, because they were fakes. The dichotomy in the Chinese situation is that you have a country competing for markets with the USA and Europe and yet they think that they can achieve this by coming up with their Sinified version of Twitter (which is blocked in China anyway).

Let’s say it again just in case it didn’t sink in first time around. English as we know it and speak it (especially the oral bit) won’t be our lingua franca forever. Eventually either another language will take over (I’m of the opinion it will be Spanish because of the large Latin population in the States and the fact that it will be the official language of the country in fifteen to twenty years) or English will develop into unrecognisable (to us now) variants depending on which country you are. Globlish is a good example of this. That means that no matter how much the Chinese newspaper People’s Daily rails against the pernicious influence of the evil empire’s lexicon, people in China, chiefly young people, will continue to use the English term “NBA” instead of wrecking their brains trying to come up with a Chinese equivalent. In the meantime they could do something constructive and attempt to translate and answer the riddle posed above: “why is a raven like a writing desk?”

© 2014

Photo taken from The Economist

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 15^th June at 10am (GMT)

Living in a Multilingual World (The One About MLE)

Michael Rosen is an acclaimed British author who has written countless books for children and adults. Whilst not familiar with the latter that much, I am well acquainted with the former. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, Sonsense Nogs and Tea in the Sugar Bowl, Potato in My Shoe are some of the titles I have read over the years. Michael’s imagination knows no limits.

That is why I was really looking forward to reading his contribution to Radio 2 and the New Statesman’s What Makes Us Human series. The name might ring some bells to some of you as, back in the summer when I was away from my blog, I uploaded a couple of articles from the series. Mr Rosen did not disappoint me. His essay was on history and what he called the “paradox” of it. Like his monthly “letters” to Michael Gove, our education secretary, his column was thought-provoking as well.

Reading Rosen’s wonderfully crafted write-up led me also down a path I had not considered before. On musing over what history represents for humans (I’m the bloke scurrying about trying to find out stuff to do with my great-grandparents or great-uncles and aunts. More history. Or I’m the bloke wondering why British people say “I’ve got” and Americans say “I’ve gotten”) Michael reminded me of the role language has played in the making of our history. As part of our human culture, regardless of nationality, gender, class or race, language is a key element of our identity. No two human beings speak the same way, have the same inflection or even pronounce words the same way. The current rising-intonation-at-the-end-of-affirmative-sentences epidemic sweeping the UK teenage population might mortify some, but, believe you me, these adolescents still sound British, as opposed to Australian.

Recently I have been hearing more and more people talking about the correct way we ought to speak English. Or rather, about the incorrect ways some people speak it. More specifically, there are self-appointed guardians of the English language who are terrified of a new phenomenon: the linguistic melting pot. We all know about the melting pot. New York is one, so is London and Paris does not lag behind. It is the confluence of different nationalities and races in one place. It is what makes an ordinary, run-of-the-mill city a metropolis all of a sudden. Language is a logical part of this process. So far, though, linguistic contributions had remained in the periphery with the host nation being able to fend off (unintentionally) most advances. Think of the RP accent that dominated the BBC for so many years. But the landscape has changed dramatically in the last decade or so. Regional intonations are frequently heard now on both radio and television. What could have been thought of niche accents years ago, are taking on a more prominent role nowadays, if not on mainstream media, at least amongst the youth. It is this last group that is calling the shots. They are changing the rhythm with which English is spoken, stressing syllables that are normally unstressed.

Without wanting to come across as a fence-sitter, I understand both camps. Those who criticise the expansion of what’s come to be known as Multicultural London English (although it’s not a phenomenon that only takes place in the British capital) might be striving for a linguistic structure that is easily accessible to all and perfectly understandable. I can sympathise with that feeling. As a non-native speaker, I find my language resources wanting when faced with a regional dialect or a slang-ridden sentence. Even those born and bred in English-speaking countries sometimes struggle with certain speech patterns. The desire for a linguistic level playing field is, thus, justified. Besides, with a job market getting narrower by the day, people need to show as many skills as possible. In order to do this, they have to be able to be fluent, confident speakers. Someone who ends her/his sentences with “innit?” is not going to get very far, no matter how much we protest and say that experience and the ability to perform the role efficiently is what counts.

However, that would be almost like denying the evolution of language. To me that would be as if the creationist movement suddenly took control of the way we spoke and built its own Royal Academy of the English Language. God made us this way and this is the way we ought to speak forever and ever. Again, I turn to Michael Rosen for a beautiful reflection on history: People all around us sing songs, tell stories of what’s happened to them, talk about their parents and grandparents, where they used to live. We remember some of this, and somehow it all becomes us. Becomes us. That is what happens to language, too. It becomes us. We become it. When we sing “Old pirates, yes, they rob I; Sold I to the merchant ships”, we forget about the objective case of “I” and lose ourselves in the message of redemption the song conveys. I say “ourselves”, I can’t vouch for you, but I do. When I talk to older people in my barrio who have lived in it for so long they can’t remember any longer, they tell me tales of exodus, of Cockneys migrating to Essex and Poles, Somalis and Turks replacing them. Whether the self-appointed guardians of the English language like it or not, this influx has an impact. On our lifestyle, our habits, our culture and, of course, it has a deep impact on our language. I have no other option but to (willingly) embrace it. Will you, too?

© 2014

Next Post; “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 2^nd March at 10am (GMT)

Living in a Multilingual World (The One About Words and Their Meanings)

The word “radical” has an interesting history. It’s a term that, in the political sense, is the equivalent of “reform” or “reformist”. Hence when you say “radical reforms”, you’re indulging in a bit of pleonasm. However, whether you’re being redundant or not, “radical” is one of those words we need nowadays, especially to separate the wheat from the chaff at Westminster. Michael Gove’s educational reforms are not radical, whether they are a pleonasm or not, they’re stupid.

The reason why I have been musing over the term “radical” is that it’s one of those words whose meaning used to evoke images of someone advocating deep economic, political and social transformation. Very rarely did it refer to extremists, even if some radicals did make use of non-conventional, unorthodox methods to achieve their aims. I don’t mean to sound conservative (small “c”) or precious about language – English or Spanish, or both. Languages change, that’s what they do. They evolve over time. But sometimes I am puzzled as to how some terms lose some of their meaning.

Take the word “gay”, for instance. No longer does this word mean “having or showing a merry, lively mood”. No, it either means “homosexual”, or – and this is the coup de grâce – “lame, rubbish”. It was former Radio 1 DJ and misogynist-in-chief at the BBC, Chris Moyles, who made use of the latter meaning more often. Why? How do you go from being cheerful to being stupid? At the moment I am about to finish Jerusalem, a wonderful, doorstopper of a book about the history and culture of that beautiful city. One I would like to visit someday. The text is full of quotes and references to times and people gone by. Some of the passages talk about “gay this” and “gay that”, always conveying a sense of joy and happiness. It’s hard to read these sentences without feeling annoyed at the glib use of the word “gay” nowadays.

Of course, sometimes linguistic developments do have a deep social effect. In Cuba the equivalent of the word “millionaire” – “millonario” - was given a revamp after the triumph of the Revolution. It no longer meant a person who had millions stashed away in the bank, but someone who went the extra mile on the sugar cane field and whose labour resulted in "millions" of tonnes of Cuba's former main economic staple. The impact this change had on our collective psyche was that in a very short time we began to see farmers and other country folk in a different light and as a consequence accorded them more respect.

Back to the word “radical” and one of the ways it has been used recently is as an adjective to describe the actions of the two men who killed Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich, London a fortnight ago. Whilst I agree with the noun to which the word “radical” has been annexed, “fundamentalist”, I think it’s misleading to think that these two murderers had social, economic and political reforms in mind. To me a radical person is s/he who seeks a thorough reorganisation of society, the wo/man who wants to eliminate privilege and inequality. I am all for linguistic evolution and forward-thinking when it comes to languages. Sometimes, though, it is better to call a spade a spade. What those two men did in the streets of London was not radical. It was savage, cruel and inhuman.

© 2013

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 9^th June at 10am (GMT)

Living in a Bilingual World

It baffles me somewhat that I have left this section unattended for so long. I love writing about the wonderful world of languages. After all that’s what I majored in at university. And “Living in a Bilingual World” has always had an appreciative and receptive audience on this blog. In fact, my regular linguistic outing was included in a book a couple of years ago, “Multilinguals are…?” by educator and scholar Maddalena Cruz-Ferreira. It was a recent essay in Prospect magazine that made me bring Living in a Bilingual World back. Under the title Let them learn English, the article focused on the division that exists in the teaching of the English language in India and how the poorest are, as usual, the ones faring worse.

That the language of Shakespeare, Alice Munro and James Baldwin remains the lingua franca worldwide should come as no surprise to anyone. I’ve written here before about English natural ability to adapt to the modern world. Its malleability means that anyone can learn the language; even if its phonetic and spelling systems remain a mystery (there are twenty-six letters in the English alphabet to represent its forty-four phonemes!). And I’m talking from the point of view of someone who taught the language for a number of years as both as an undergraduate student and teacher.

 

This resilience and flexibility benefit people in countries like India where, according to Zareer Massani, the author of the Prospect piece, there’s no truly national language. He states that “Hindi, the central government’s official language, is an artificial, 20^th century construct created by purging Hindustani, the colloquial language of the north, of most of its Islam-derived Persian and Arabic words. Now, 65 years after independence, Hindi is still a little spoken officialese one grapples with government forms.”

If Zareer is right and this is the linguistic panorama in India, it then makes sense to default to a language with which the rest of the world is at least acquainted. But of course, there is the small problem of the British Empire. India was a prized possession of it. And not everyone agrees that the imperial legacy was benign and beneficial. In fact opinions have always been divided on the matter. This is the reason why many in the Asian nation are opposed to English becoming the de facto language. Plus, English apparently carries with it a whiff of privilege and elitism in the subcontinent. It’s still mainly used by those occupying the upper echelons of education, media and the judiciary. By contrast outside this mini-world, there’s a whole Babel of dialects nationwide that merit as much attention as or maybe more attention than the language of the former conquistadores.

It’s a dilemma with which I can sympathise from a personal perspective, even if it is to a lesser degree. When I moved to the UK my accent was still heavily American, with a North-eastern lilt. This was the consequence of having had three or four postgraduate teachers hailing from or living in Boston and New York. Over here in the UK, people were at a loss as to why a Cuban would choose to speak like an American when we were supposed to be at loggerheads with them.

The answer is that first of all, it’s our two governments that have locked horns for more than five decades. When it comes to common, ordinary folk from both the US and Cuba, we leave our political differences aside and get on pretty well most of the time. And the second element is that most schools, further and higher education institutions in Cuba teach American English as opposed to the British standard. The latter is seen as distant, not just geographically, but also practically. But what is non-practical for a Cuban can become very useful to an Indian. So, when our compadres and comadres from the subcontinent use (chiefly British) English as a way out of poverty and deprivation, they’re being neither anti-nationalist nor pro-empire, but resourceful. In order to explain this approach, Massani quotes Mumbai-based businessman and journalist Jerry Rao: “Even if you flunk your schools finals, if you can speak decent English, today you can get a nice job. But even if you have a master’s degree and your English is poor, you’re likely to end up in a labour market where salaries are significantly lower.”

I witnessed a similar situation in Cuba in the early to mid-90s when many professionals, including doctors and teachers, defected to the tourism sector. Their motivation? The green Yankee dollar. Whilst their hard-earned salaries in Cuban pesos were getting more and more devalued, those working at hotels and tourist resorts were minting it. And that was just from tips. There was a problem, however. Many of these highly trained professionals had been educated either in the old socialist bloc or in Cuba but with socialist ideals. The language they’d learnt, used and were used to, was Russian. Russian. In a globalised world trading in English. Yes, you can imagine the rest. Scrapheap doesn’t even begin to cover it.

That’s how in my first paid job as a teacher I faced a classroom full of people coming from a wide variety of professional backgrounds. There were mechanics, lawyers, journalists, ballet dancers (in fact, Lorna Feijóo, prima ballerina at the National Ballet of Cuba, was one of my students). You name it; they were there, trying to do the same thing their Indian counterparts are doing now: getting at least one foot on the first rung of the social and economic ladder.

The irony is that despite the strong presence the Brits had on Indian soil, the influence the empire had on Indian life and the ubiquity and usefulness of the English language in the world, Gandhi’s sons and daughters are headed in the wrong direction. It is said that in ten or fifteen years’ time Hispanics will be the largest minority ethnic group in the US, replacing African-American in the process. And in probably ten more years after that, Spanish will replace English as the official language of the States. And where the US goes, the UK oftentimes follows. Spanish is, then, the way to go, my lovely Indian chums. And here’s the first word for you to learn: ¡Bienvenidos!

2012

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 9^th December at 10am (GMT)

Living in a Bilingual World (The One About the English Language and its Quirks)

German has its subordinate clauses where the verb is always placed at the end. Spanish and French have the ubiquitous (and difficult!) subjunctive mood to negotiate. Plus two dyed-in-the-wool academies (Real Academia Española and l’Académie Française respectively) with very little time for modern, linguistic twists. And English? Well, the language of the Anglo-Saxons has gone Globish, a lexicon whose existence is deeply rooted in the way the role of English has been reframed in recent decades, becoming anarchic by nature in the process. From Nigeria to Malaysia, Shakespeare's language belongs to no one and to everybody. We speak English in whichever way we want to.

And yet...

There still exists within this lingua franca a trait that is enough to send the sanest of human beings to the nearest madhouse: it is the stark contrast between the spelling and the pronunciation of many words.

If you've ever felt as if you were metaphorically marooned on a deserted island because you couldn't work out how to pronounce and/or tell 'should' or 'sought' apart, then, welcome to the club, my friend. This is the 'Club of Non-Natives Who Thought English Was Easier Because Of Its Grammar, Only To Find Out That Its Pronunciation Vs Spelling Structure Was Anything But'. Long title, I know, but it truly reflects the club's large membership.

Take 'weight' [weyt] and 'height'[hahyt]. We all know what they mean and how to pronounce them. But have you ever stopped to think of what would happen if you tried to utter one of those two words using the articulation of the other? In the case of 'weight' pronounced as 'height', your audience, at best, would try to work out why you're including references to 'biped' or 'Homo Sapiens' in your conversation; at worst you'd be downright misunderstood. With 'height' the situation would be very different. Any attempt to apply the way we pronounce 'weight' to the noun that denotes 'extent or distance upward' will be met with quizzical looks. Why are you asking me what my 'hate' is? You mean my pet hate? Confusing, I know.

One of the reasons for this mess, beautiful and intriguing as it is, though, is that English is not the result of one single linguistic stream. English is the result of centuries and centuries of, sometimes small and sometimes large, geopolitical and historical events, which have brought about deep and significant changes in the way it is spoken and written today. Take Hollywood for instance. Starting in the 1920s and peaking in the '40s its presence and influence have been omnipresent, chiefly in a Europe devastated by the Second World War and in need of escapism. Thus, American English, or at least the brand exported by Tinseltown became the standard by which most countries strove to speak this Germanic language. The examples abound, 'theater' was favoured over 'theatre' and 'color' over 'colour'.

That still leaves the whole phonemes vs graphemes question unanswered. Whereas in a language like French you know that there are three kinds of 'e' sounds whose pronunciation usually matches spelling (yeux, les and chaise, for instance), in English the disparity between what you hear and what you read is abysmal. For example the grapheme [a] can be found in the following words and yet the pronunciation changes each time: hat, adorn, mate, pillage.

Attempts to simplify the spelling of words in English are being made, even if they have not proved to be successful. One reason is that there's no national or international body tasked with the responsibility of safeguarding the English language for future generations. And good on English, I say! Spanish and French have long lagged behind their Germanic counterpart because the two aforementioned academies frown upon neologisms. In the language of Cervantes you have to wait for decades before a new term is admitted in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española despite the fact that it's probably already widely used by Spanish-speakers. By contrast English is dynamic and ever-changing, coining new words and phrases. If only their pronunciation/spelling combination made sense most of the time!

The other night when I began to write this column the first example that came to my head was 'laughter' [lafter] and 'slaughter' [slawter]. Just one letter ('s') separates both words and yet they couldn't be more different. On the news a few years before I'd heard that a wedding in Afghanistan had ended in a bloodbath when the crew of a US fighter jet had mistakenly thought that the shots being fired in the air were projectiles aimed at them. They were instead part of a traditional celebration. In the comfort of my London home I thought of how, through the addition or omission of one letter and a change in pronunciation, a journalist's report could move from elation to tragedy in an instant. A quirky - and dare I say, cruel - trait indeed.

© 2011

Next Post: ‘Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music’, to be published on Sunday 20th March at 10am (GMT)

Living in a Bilingual World (The One About the Cuban President and His Brother)

'It's like taking that CD we're listening to now out of this car and playing it in my car instead'.

It was my father who had just spoken. We were listening to the Chucho Valdes' 'Solo: Live In New York' album on our way back to his house from my grandfather's (my dad's dad) in the countryside and my progenitor was answering my wife's question on whether Cuba's situation (political, economic and social) had changed since Raúl Modesto Castro Ruz had come to power last year to replace his elder brother Fidel.

And my father was not the only one having the same thought. Wherever I went in the Cuban capital people just shrugged their shoulders at the same question whilst shooting me (and not my wife) a 'What-do-you-think-bro'er-don't-play-dumb-with-me-now-you-live-abroad- you-know-how-things-work-in-Cuba' look full of defiance and haplessness at the same time.

But there was one shortcoming which my father failed to take into account when he described the current Cuban president and his ruling style.

The power of the spoken word.

Or lack of it thereof.

I had the misfortune to see and hear Raúl speaking in public, a phenomenon that was almost rare when Fidel was still around. Whereas the latter had a knack for oratory on his side Raúl is the opposite. Please, note the use of the past tense in the verb 'to have' in the previous sentence. More on that later.

Like it or not (and the naysayers will be reminding me in no time to give Fidel a wide berth) Cuba's ex-president had the confidence and flair to speak to a congregation for hours on end. Even if a large majority in the crowd would just as soon be somewhere else. Fidel, in his first thirty years at the helm of the Cuban government (1959-1989) displayed the same qualities the ancient Greeks and Romans showed when addressing an audience. His skill as an orator was one of the most important factors in securing support from the Cuban people. This was also helped at the same time by a very effective secret service (G2) and coercion by trade unions, women, children and young people's mass organisations.

Fidel's earlier speeches reminded people, both abroad and in Cuba, of ancient Athens and Rome where orators enjoyed a great deal of popularity. His stand against the US government in the 60s brought to mind Demosthenes' Philippics against Philip II of Macedon. His use of the technique known as 'tricolon', where a speaker uses three elements to emphasise an idea, saw him declaring in 1961 that the Cuban Revolution was 'of the poor, for the poor and by the poor'. That the poor are poorer now remains a moot point, but at the time, 16th April, 1961, they sounded fresh and vibrant, especially in the aftermath of an aerial attack on Cuban soil the day before.

Other techniques used by the ex-lawyer-turned-president were 'antonomasia' and 'call-and-response'. The former refers to the substitution of a phrase for a proper name, i.e., 'those who want Cuba to sink' (the US government in this case, although, who's sunk Cuba more, a bureaucratic, centralised, pseudo-socialist economy, or the embargo, or a combination of both, remains contentious) whereas the latter draws from the African call and response musical pattern (and as an Afro-Cuban dance tutor and performer I should know).

But I have left for the end Fidel's strongest oratorial skill and the one that enabled him to keep a stranglehold on the Cuban population for so many years (hence the past tense of 'to have' above). It was the Aristotelian triumvirate of pathos, logos and ethos: emotion, argument and character respectively. Raúl Castro lacks all three. Fidel hijacked the first one and made it his, closed down the second one and developed the third one to become a blueprint for wannabe dictators (for a bad example, look at Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president).

All in all, this discussion about Fidel's erstwhile adroit political rhetoric can't mask the fact that slogans cannot be eaten and again we turn to a historical figure, Roman politician Cicero, who argued that the true orator is one whose practice of citizenship embodies a civic ideal.

Sadly that is not the case in Cuba today.

© 2009

Living in a Bilingual World (Portuguese State of Mind)

There are words in some languages that are enticingly built for pleasure. These are terms that roll off the tip of our tongue with no brakes on, falling blithely into a realm of self-indulgence and hedonism.

The Portuguese word saudade is the only term I know of whose meaning escapes the borders of linguistics and enters the kingdom of emotions and feelings. For starters it is an ambiguous term, as in it hasn't a definite meaning. Depending on the context it is used in it can convey different ideas. I have seen it translated as 'longing' in English, but even that is rather misleading as it can also signify 'joy'. Everytime I hear it, it catches me unawares in the same way someone who steps on the back of my shoe in the underground does.

In order to write this post I e-mailed my dance students (many of which speak Portuguese) and fellow dance tutors (some of which come from Brazil, Angola and Portugal) and asked them to give me their definition of saudade. I have included some of their replies below (no contribution has been altered or edited). As you will see their responses are not clear-cut and exact. And how can you be with a word whose significance is chiefly affirmed by the speakers who utilise it? And by those of us who, though not able to speak the language fluently, appreciate the feelings evoked by one of its linguistic jewels.

This is from Mireilla, a long-standing dance pupil of mine:

What about nostalgia or a yearning,nostalgic longing?

Francesca, on the other hand, has one of her co-workers help her out with my enquiry:

My Brazilian colleague says: it can mean positive but also negative feelings, such as missing somebody or something from the past, feeling blue or nostalgic. There is no such word in English.

Mariana could hardly contain her enthusiasm when she received my electronic missive:

hello, what a lovely email to receive

i'm half brazilian and half english, born in sao paulo raised in london, bilingual and work in theatre and dance. i think you touch on the wonders of bilingualism. i think i once read or someone once told me that with every new language we learn a new way to see and experience life, new ways to live and as a theatre practioner interested in multi lingual performance i discover something new in this way every day, but the best thing about it is that there is no absolute. language changes according to the meaning needed at the point in time, by who speaks it and where they are, and how beautiful is that!

anyway im sure you know or have you own views on this as a linguist, but i thought id write these words down as i feel the beauty of what you hit upon is that we dont always need to rely on one definition, conflicting and differing ones can also be valid.

Saudades Carinho and Companero are my favourite words in portuguese. Saudades to me in brief is the feeling you feel when you miss someone, therefore it can be however that feeling manifests to you.We dont have a descriptive word for that feeling in english, we have the past action i missed or i am missing which suggests the action that occurs now, and we understand the feeling associated in this way, but we dont actually have a word for the feeling, i dont think. Perhpas longing? but thats not exactly it cos it applies want, and is perhaps melancholy, with sad notionsSaudades is an arduous feeling, we love and hate, i think saudades cements what you feel for someone, your love you friendship you concern with another morfs into another version of itself whilst the other is distant. another one for you just for the hell of it, i thought i understand companero but i was being too literal.an alternative is 'the one you part bread with', few of my english, conservative, capitalist extreme friends could not get their heads around that. i guess our lived experiences no longer reflect that action so much. thank you for a lovely email and giving me an outlet to rant about something im passionate about.

Zela, though not fluent in Portuguese, contributed to the discussion:

I have never spoken a word of Portuguese but now that you share this with me I think its great to know that one word could mean so much that it cannot be explained in English except that we accept it for what it is/ the feeling it brings you when you say it .....The true meaning of love is ultimately the great feelings of joy and prosperity and divine inspiration that comes with so much more that you cant quite put your finger on defining it.

Maybe it is the thought that love (Saudade) if it stands for all those things; tenderness, affection and care it is most definately overwhelmingly magnificent!

I have left for the end the reply I got from Iris de Brito, an Angolan choreographer and fellow tutor who describes this Portuguese word thus:

Saudade- You are right, its quite difficult to describe in one word.I would say it describes the act of missing someone or something, but it can also be implying a certain melancholy mixed with tenderness and love for the familiar and things we hold most dear.Its present in many songs of Fado in Lisbon, Morna in Cabo-Verde or Kilapanda in Angola, it became a word that described a longing, a sentiment deep set in our hearts.At school we were also told that this word/feeling evolved from the time of the Portuguese Discoveries when women lost their man to the sea and were waiting for them to come back indefinitely.

And in order to demonstrate with images what this word cannot explain in writing I shall leave you with a clip by the Portuguese singer Mariza singing 'Meu Fado Meu'. This is also this week's 'Song for a Winter Sunday Morning. Enjoy, com muita saudade.



Copyright 2009

Living in a Bilingual World (Cantata)

'The Battle to Save the Semicolon'

(Charles de Steuben, 2008)

Part of the current exhibition at the National Gallery

'The Internecine Schisms in the English Language
and their Effects on Contemporary British Society'

1st Oct 2008 - 1st Feb 2009
The National Gallery
Trafalgar Square
London
WC2N 5DN

For more information on this exhibition click here.

Copyright 2008

Living in a Bilingual World (Serenade)

I am still trudging through Simone de Beauvoir's feminist masterpiece 'The Second Sex' (see navigation bar on the right handside of the blog) and it's funny how I have fallen hook, line and sinker in the linguistic traps that the French writer has unintentionally placed on my path.

In Part 3, 'Myths', Chapter 1, 'Dreams, Fears and Idols', de Beauvoir addresses the feminine attributes that one usually sees cities, nations and abstract entities attired with. Obviously this bold approach set my linguistic pulse racing and with two dictionaries in hand (French and German) I ventured forth, attempting to understand the examples she numbers in her book.

Simone's exegesis includes the words: Church, Synagogue, Republic, Humanity, Peace, War, Liberty, Revolution and Victory. In her own words, 'Man feminizes the ideal he sets up before him as the essential Other, because woman is the material representation of alterity; that is why almost all allegories, in language as in pictorial representation, are women'. In short, the fact that man places these lofty ideals on a pedestal makes woman unreachable and unattainable, a perfect excuse to deny her her right to be a human being. What cannot be touched, cannot be experienced, other than through quasi-religious contact.

And is it any wonder that, in de Beauvoir's own words, this is a phenomenon encouraged mainly by the Christian world? No, it shouldn't be surprising because in Christian imagery 'Woman is the Soul and Idea, but she also is a mediatrix between them: she is the divine Grace, leading the Christian towards God, she is Beatrice guiding Dante in the beyond, Laura summoning Petrarch to the lofty summits of poetry' (op. cit.).

The curious element here, though, is that out of the four languages I analysed, three proved de Beauvoir's theory with a couple of exceptions.

The Church - La Iglesia (Spa) - L'Église (Fr) - Die Kirche (Ger)

The Synagogue - La Sinagoga - La Synagogue - Die Synanoge

The Republic - La República - La République - Die Republik

The Humanity - La Humanidad - L’Humanité - Die Menschlichkeit
The Peace - La Paz - La Paix - Die Friede

The War - La Guerra - La Guerre - Der Krieg (masculine, one of two exceptions to the rule)

The Liberty - La Libertad - La Liberté - Die Freiheit

The Revolution - La Revolución - La Révolution - Die Revolution

The Victory - La Victoria - La Victoire - Der Sieg (the other exception)

As you can see there's only one language that escapes this categorisation. And yes, my dear readers, you guessed it right. English.

This linguistic hybrid, the result of Anglo-Saxon-Jute migration from Denmark and northern Germany plus some French and Latin thrown in for good measure, is the only lexicon of the six more popular modern languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian and English) to have a neutral definite pronoun regardless of gender and number. A cause for celebration? Or a reason to despair? As a non-native speaker I find this fact comforting. It is a soft cushion aimed at protecting me against the grammatical rigour imposed by the other five.

And yet... yet... yet, as I continued to read 'The Second Sex' I could not help wondering whether despite this linguistic peculiarity English speakers still saw the nouns listed above in a feminine way rather than in their neutral natural form.

So, this is your homework for this week, my dear English speakers (and the rest, too, of course). When you think of 'Peace' and 'Liberty', just to use two of the examples above, do you see the female of the species or do you see neutrality?

Copyright 2008

Living in a Bilingual World (Requiem)

'The Assassination of Somewhat by Kind Of and Sort Of'

(Jacques Louis David, 2008)

Part of the current exhibition at the National Gallery

'The Internecine Schisms in the English Language

and their Effects on Contemporary British Society'

1st Oct 2008 - 1st Feb 2009

The National Gallery

Trafalgar Square

London

WC2N 5DN

Copyright 2008

Of Language and Other Topics

ish: Approximately; somewhat, as in greenish.

No, that can't be. Or rather, it can, but then again, online dictionaries are cold-blooded and emotionless entities. Ish is the quintessential, distinctive element of modern-day Britain. It's the surrender of values long-heralded as representative of UK culture. Punctuality and promptness, stiff-upper lipness and pragmatism. Ish is the corrupting element that has eroded a whole culture with the same patience and dedication shown by the sea in its gentle and slow obliteration of the hard and rough rock.

Before moving to the UK, my acquaintance with ish was based on its use as a suffix. Not so in good ol' England! Fast forward to ten years later and I'm one of those people who will agree to meet someone else at '11ish'. Like most Britons, I use this ish as a friendly, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, relaxed and laid-back part of my everyday language, displaying signs of informality akin to my culture, but assumed to be at odds with the Anglo-Saxon social make-up everyone around the world is so accustomed to.

What makes people use this at-first-sight harmless and innocent-looking/sounding affix at the end of words like old, new, OK and so many others that I would need Moses' two stone tablets to write down the myriad ways in which people use them?

Take old, for instance. You have young, young adult, middle-aged and then old or elderly. What's wrong with this classification? Since when has it been politically incorrect to say that so and so is old? Ah, but there it goes, our wee, little friend ish to meddle in affairs that are of no concern to it. By saying oldish you're knocking a few years off the person in question. Not that they would object to that, mind. They are neither passé, nor spring-chickenish (you see?) anymore. They are just oldish.

Ish has come to save situations where a more direct response would have led to conflict. Take OK. By saying that something is OKish, along with the corresponding shoulder-shrugging movement and chirpy, cheeky smile possessed nowadays by any self-respected shop assistant, she/he will have made a powerful disclaimer. Should the 'something' (item of clothing, personal stereo, bike helmet) be faulty, they could lawfully claim to having advised the customer correctly in that their choice was not totally up to scratch, just OKish. Flip the coin to the other side and you'll have a happy client marching out the shop satisfied with their ishiness.

In the end, ish is here to stay. It's part of the cappuchino culture apparently inherited from the US and mainland Europe. It indicates coolness and urban chic. And I, for one, will continue to join the masses who display their ishiness loud and proud. Or should that be loudish and proudish?

Copyright 2008

Living in a Bilingual World (Allegro)

Saturday 29th March, The Round Chapel, Hackney, London, evening.

Daughter: ¡Papi, papi, mira! (Daddy, Daddy, look!)

Me: ¿Mmm... qué es? ¡Ah, una rosa! ¡Qué linda! (Hmmm... what is it? Uh, a rose! How pretty!)

Daughter: Sí, y es de 'fábrica'. (Yes, and it's made of 'factory')

Me: ¿De qué? (Made of what?)

Daughter (puzzled): ¿De... 'fábrica'...? (Made of... 'factory'...?)

Me: ¡Ah, de tela! Muy bien. (Ah, it's made of fabric, OK!)

Daughter: Sí, de tela, por supuesto. Chao. (Yes, fabric, of course. Bye)

And off she goes.

Bilingual world. I love it.

Copyright 2008