As someone who does a lot of traveling overseas, I have become accostomed to finiding myself in situations where I cannot understand 100% of what is being said around me. Depending on where I am and the context in which I find myself, sometimes I understand most, but not all, while many other time I understand fifty percent or less. When you live like that for extended periods, you find yourself developing coping mechanisms. One of these is the noncommittal response: a shrug of the shoulders and "mmmmm" while nodding the head. There's also the smile and nod or even the laugh and nod (although if you're ever traveling in Russia, I'd suggest avoiding the smiling/laughing as that might get miscronstrued as I want to sleep with you). Also, if it is obvious that you've been asked a question, sometimes smiling and nodding works then too (although then who knows what you're agreed to!) although a hapless smile and a shrug seems to get one out of these situations easily in a lot of places. Certainly, there are plenty of situations where using these techniques should be avoided, but when strangers on the street or distant acquaintances babble things at you in a foreign tongue, I've found that these tricks work well. That way you don't always come across as the imbecile foriegner who hasn't bothered to master the local tongue.
The accents of the people in my neighborhood here in the US are, in many cases, nearly unintelligible to me. The other day, the man who lives at the house behind me asked me a question four times before I understood him. The first three times, the only words I understood were "your momma." Now, my mom's over here a lot, and I figured there was a pretty good chance that that the answer to his question was yes, and I was just about to give up and smile and nod when I realized I'm in an English speaking neighborhood, I shouldn't have to do that! Finally, after asking me four times, I understood: Was it my mom who had asked him about his dog the other day?
Whenever I speak to my neighbors (which is pretty rare, and after the incident the other day, bound to be rarer) I find myself feeling as though I should emulate their speech patterns. I feel as though if I speak with proper English, I'm setting myself even further apart from them than I am already, like I'm trying to show through my words that I am somehow better than them. I was having a different conversation with the fellow who lives behind me yesterday, and he wanted to know why I wasn't married, why I didn't have a boyfriend, etc. His question, actually, was, Why you ain't got no man? and I found myself answering (without even thinking about it) I on't need no man! (And you're seeing that correctly, no "d" in "don't").
I love eavesdropping on people, and the people in my neighborhood are out in the street a lot. There's a tendency among my neighbors to shout (er, holla) jovially at one another, and I'm always trying to ascertain what's going on without actually having to stick my head out the door and see. Usually I have no clue. It's as though everyone is speaking a different language.
I spent a month in this house last summer, before heading off to Korea. After I left, my mom discovered that someone had written with their finger, in the dust on my trashcan white girl stay here. We debated whether or not it was a request (as in White girl, please stay here) or a statement of fact (There is a white girl who stays in this house). I choose to believe it was the latter.
Similarly, here's a conversation I had with a girl of about 10 who lives on my block:
Girl: I thought you was older.
Jane: Oh, you probably saw my mom. We look a lot alike.
Jane: Oh, you probably saw my mom. We look a lot alike.
Girl: Oh. Your momma stay wit you?
Jane: No, she lives a few miles down the road.
Linda, who started this topic off for us this week, mentioned that she got the idea for this topic from reading a recent post on my blog - the one about the crazy naked old dude in my house. Yeah, you should probably go read that, if you haven't already. I've been thinking about that incident, and wondering if there was something I did that gave the crazy old coot the impression that I would like to see him naked. Was there something I agreed to that I misunderstood? Did I smile at something that should have instead earned him a glare? Hard to know. (In case y'all are interested, he showed up a couple of days ago, knocking on my door. I didn't open it or say anything, and he went away.)
Also, because I just used the contraction y'all, I would like point out that English desperately needs a plural you, and I think y'all works just fine. So long as it's not contracted like ya'll, as that's just nonsensical.
6 comments:
So, now we have another set of dialects! Danish and Swedish are separate languages, but you and your neighbours are speaking American English (standard and African American Vernacular English, or AAVE). Are Danish and Swedish more mutually intelligible than Standard American and AAVE?
I have no idea. But it's an interesting question.
i'd also like to note that i'm able to communicate fairly well in german with a speaker of dutch. i think there's a certain awareness of the way certain sounds are put together that enable one to better understand what is being said around them: jane on't need no man, but would her neighbor have understood if jane had said "i choose to not be in a relationship at this time"? too many hard consonants in that phrase, whereas the AAVE of the neighborhood seems to include mostly vowels and m & n type consonants. similarly, german has lots of harsh ch, k, z, d, and v sounds. i feel like learning a language (or dialect) becomes easier when one has been exposed to the sounds of said dialect.
after i had lived in japan for two years and heard the language (although i did not take any lessons) i was able to understand when an elderly woman explained to me that she had been a music teacher in hiroshima, but was visiting someone out of town when the bomb was dropped. not that i knew very many of the words she used, but my familiarity with the sounds of the language enabled me to understand the few words i did know and form them into a coherent story.
not sure where i'm going with this, so i'll stop now.
Tabarnak, soon y'all be jawin' like us po' Southners!
Take y'allselves a gander at the followin':
The Southern Drawl: Is It Spreading? Some Linguists Say 'Yes' as More Northerners Move South, but Others See Stiff Resistance to 'Y'all'
http://abcnews.go.com/US/CSM/story?id=3637113&page=1
Sad to say, that even though I am a deep South Texan, my accent is so neutral no one pegs me as being from Texas. Damn you Hollywood television for forcing the likes of Lucy Lawless, Hugh Laurie, Hugh Jackman, and of course, Errol Flynn to give up their natural accents and talk "American!"
"Are Danish and Swedish more mutually intelligible than Standard American and AAVE?"
I lived in Sweden for a year and studied Swedish, and I have to say, no. Swedes and Norwegians can understand each other pretty well, and Swedes can read Danish, but spoken Danish is a bunch of nonsense without consonants. :-)
I can remember when AAVE was BVE. My, how times have changed.
Speakers of different Slavic languages, I have heard, can understand each other pretty well. My Czech friend visited Macedonia, and he said he was able to get most of what people were saying there. Another Czech told me that it is easier for the Western slavs to understand the Eastern slavs than the other way around, because Polish, Czech and Slovak have changed much of their vocabulary to assimilate foreign words, while, say, Russian, Bulgarian and Ukrainian have not. I'd take that with a grain of salt, though. It has a self-flattering ring to it that I don' t exactly trust.
Languages that aren't Russian really confuse the hell out of me - I understand tons of words, but usually have no clue as to what is actually being said.
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