A multilingual life
The importance of learning the local languages and other linguistic perspectives
I did it again. I thought I was reading something in English, but it was in Portuguese. My Portuguese must be better than I thought, then.
I hope you don’t mind me being a bit personal, but speaking is personal, isn’t it? In spite of that, I hope the following may have some interest for others.
Lots of people are moving to other countries, some because they have to, others because they just want to. Some flee for their lives, others just long for a friendlier climate. They become expats, as the term is in English. Many of them huddle together in colonies, like the one my friend and I came across in southern Spain, many years ago. We were living in downtown Barcelona, behind the tourist brochures. Around Christmas, we needed to escape the city life and took the train to Malaga in the south. There we went to a tourist information bureau and asked a sleepy person behind the counter, if he could recommend a small town without tourists.
He looked at us with an almost painful expression in his eyes and gestured towards a map and said: “Ah! It’s impossible! Tourists here, tourists there, tourists everywhere!” He shrugged his shoulders and sighed deeply. The man had obviously ended up with the wrong job, but we felt with him.
Anyway, I pointed to a spot on the map, further north along the coast, a few kilometres inland. Torrox. What about that one? Were there any buses going there? It was.
After a few days in that sleepy town, hanging out with Jesus and other locals, we heard about something called Torrox del Costa – Torrox by the Coast. We heard it were only Germans living there, so out of curiosity we walked down four kilometres before we arrived in expat hell.
The first impression was of a suburb in an East German industrial town. Grey, concrete apartment blocks. We went into a bierstube. Every detail was German, even the music was German, and the ashtrays displayed names of German products. We moved on and found a bar or club of some sort, named Copacabana or some other name which gave the impression of being fake.
The bartender addressed me in German, but looked very Spanish, so I replied in my poor Spanish and explained that my German was even poorer. Practically nonexistent. He was very pleased anyhow and confessed to me that it was the first time he spoke his own language, during the four years he had been working there!
Some years after this, I moved to Portugal. I was lucky enough to end up in a smaller city in the interior, halfway between the old university city of Coimbra, and the Spanish border, to Viseu. Although some of the people I already had learnt to know there, spoke English reasonably well, most people did not, as the first foreign language they learnt in school was still French in those days, and although I think it’s a beautiful language, my knowledge of it was limited to je ne parle pas français – I don’t speak French.
Neither were there many foreigners around, so I simply had to learn Portuguese, not that it was so simple. I had an advantage in my somewhat rudimentary Spanish, since the two languages are quite close to each other, both with roots in Latin. That fact gave me another advantage, because a lot of the foreign words which has entered into my own Norwegian language, are derived from Latin.
To move to a foreign country where they speak a foreign language, is like travelling into a foggy landscape. You’re hardly able to see anything in front of you at first. Then, when you slowly begin to pick up some of the language, you can see some brighter spots where the fog is less dense. Depending on how fast you learn the new language, you will gradually be able to see more and more.
The expats in their colonies lose out on most of this, although there are exceptions, of course. One might ask whether they really live in the same country as the rest of the population, or if they live in a kind of a bubble, like underneath a glass dome.
Aside from that, it’s like you become handicapped in the beginning. You’re being crippled, mentally. It’s a sad fact that many people will judge you on your ability to speak. If you don’t speak much or poorly, or if you’re downright dumb, which also means stupid, you will be regarded as just that. Dumb or stupid. Not necessarily out of ill will, but more like a reflex, I think.
One of the first things you lose, is your sense of humour. That is because much of what we know as humour, of jokes et cetera, is built upon a play with words. Don’t worry, though. It will return to you, the better you know the new language.
Back to the beginning. As I mentioned, it happens that I think I’ve read something in English, when it actually was in Portuguese. Interestingly enough, I don’t make the same mistake between Norwegian and Portuguese, but often enough with Swedish and Norwegian, probably because they’re even closer related than the two Iberian languages.
When I speak, anything can happen, though. If people start looking at me with a certain confused look in their eyes, I know that I’ve done it again. Spoken in the wrong language — like in Portuguese to my Norwegian relatives, for instance.
