On learning to dismount the high horse

As you (probably) know, I am a South African expat, living in the UK. If you're an expat, too, you will know that a conversation about your accent is something that takes place pretty much on a daily basis. Shopkeepers, people with whom you strike up conversations on the train, people on the other end of the phone, fellow attendees at business meetings... everywhere and anywhere seems to be the right place and any time seems to be the right time for "Where are you from?"

Some people like to guess. South Africans ('saffas'), New Zealanders (kiwis) and Australians (ozzies) often get mistaken for each other. At one stage, I worked with an Australian. We had a lot in common and we got on really well. His family and mine spent social time together on the weekends. This clearly showed in the way we interacted with each other at work, and many people assumed we were a couple, because we got on so well together and 'had the same accent.'

These are three very competitive sporting nations and in general, it doesn't go down too well with a national from one to be mistaken for another. I was no exception. I bristled when I was asked if (and sometimes told that) I was an ozzie or a kiwi. A facetious "g'day mate" brought out the worst in me.

But then I realised something. I can't tell accents apart, either. Yes, I can tell my ozzies from my kiwis (it's in the As and the Is), but I can't tell a Pole from a Latvian - and we have many of both in our town. I can't tell a Pakistani from an Indian, and there are many of both of those all over the UK. I have no idea how offended a Polish person is when asked if they're Latvian, or vice versa. I have no idea whether a cricket fan from Pakistan bristles at being asked if s/he is enjoying an England/India game being televised at the time.

So I decided to get down off that high horse before I got a nosebleed. It really isn't a big deal. And at least the person is showing some interest and making conversation about something other than the weather.

But I'm still ridiculously pleased when someone gets it right. Just this morning, I popped into a little shop on the Charing Cross station and the man behind the counter identified me as a South African. I asked how he could tell, and he said (a) that he was a fan of cricket in general and Kepler Wessels in particular and (b) that with the South African embassy being just across the road, hordes of saffas visited his shop on a daily basis. The man himself was from India...or Pakistan...or Bangladesh...or maybe even Sri Lanka. I couldn't tell. Something I am readier to admit from ground level than I ever was from my perch on that horse I mentioned.

Now if I can just learn to stop bristling when people try to 'do the accent' which I have never heard anyone do successfully...

Crossing the language divide using online tools

I'd like to tell you a true story about something that happened to me quite recently.

We keep getting mail for the previous owners of our house. We have lived in this house for more than two and a half years, so mostly, it's just junk mail. But there's one rather serious-looking envelope that keeps arriving from Paris. It's addressed in French and indicates it contains official documents which require a signature. I think it has something to do with tax, but I'm not quite sure what gave me that impression.

I have repeatedly done a return to sender, but the documents keeps returning, each time with a more urgent looking message on the envelope. Last time, I wrote on the envelope in large letters: Mr Bloggs has not lived at this address for well over two years, please update your records.

The documents came back last week.

I was tempted to open them to find some contact details, when I noticed what appeared to be a phone number on the front of the envelope. Nothing ventured...

I used Google translate to find out how to say, "Is there anyone there who can speak English, please?" and practised it a few times.

When the phone was answered, I stumbled through "Est-ce qu'il ya quelqu'un qui parle anglais, s'il vous plaît?"

The lady told me that there was not.

Hmm. How was I going to explain my situation to her? I know enough French to say "Je ne parle pas francais, mais une moment, s'il vous plait..."

I typed into the translate box, "You keep sending me letters for Mr Bloggs." followed by "But he hasn't lived in this house for more than two years." I then used the 'listen' button to play this to her through my phone.


She figured out (more or less) what I was doing and spoke very slowly back to me in a combination of French and English. Eventually, we managed to establish that I no longer wanted Mr Bloggs's tax demands (or whatever they were), that I didn't have a forwarding address for him, and that she should stop sending his mail here.

It was clunky, but you know what? It worked. Now where's my flipping babelfish?

Multilinguistic monolingualism

I've been thinking about the different forms there are of a single language, and how we need to master so many of them during a lifetime.

For example, the language I use at home with my family isn't the same as the language I would use in an academic paper (not that I ever mastered that particular form of English, it has to be said!).

My kids happily use 1337 (leet) speak online with their friends and even in their text messages to one another. Occasionally, they will use elements of 1337 when texting me. Elements of 1337 have informed lolcat (follow the link and have a bit of fun, I dare you!). Even my pedantic septuagenarian mother has adopted some of the shortcut spellings when sending text messages (her most recent message to me included the word 'fite', for example... I never thought I'd see the day!).

My last employer owned the rights to a few courses in business English in a range of delivery media.

Here are some anecdotes that illustrate misapplication of contextual terminology:
A neurosurgery theatre nurse recently told me about a wonderfully talented Vietnamese neurosurgeon who had very little English when he joined the team at the hospital where she works. Being an intelligent and determined man, he learned quickly by listening to and imitating his colleagues. But he learned the hard way that it is inappropriate to tell a patient's family, "Oh, he's toast."

When my husband arrived in South Africa as a child, at the prompting of his classmates, he went and told his teacher to "Go jump in the lake" (although you can be pretty sure what he actually said was "gaw yump in de lake"). She remembered that with fondness when he phoned her some 25 years later to wish her well on her retirement.

A pastor friend of mine went to preach at a church in Mexico, where one or two teenagers, passionately devout about their Christian faith, sported T-shirts with the most profane of slogans, utterly oblivious to the meaning of the words writ large across their chests.

If there are this many forms of the language of which I am a native speaker, goodness knows how many forms there are of the languages of which I am not a native speaker. I wonder how many times I have put my foot in it. I know of one occasion when I politely advised a Swede that my Swedish was poor, but that I could follow if only they would speak 'more badly'. I'm sure there have been countless other occasions.

As national and cultural boundaries are breached by social media, we find ourselves in daily contact with non-native speakers of our language. We might need to remember to cut them a little slack... there may be times when they say something grossly offensive without meaning to do so!

100 ways to learn a language

Increasingly, it is beneficial to speak more than one language.

Online Degree Programs recently posted an article featuring 100 different resources aimed at helping people learn languages online. These include courses through specific schools; online dictionaries; phrase-based tools; translation services; online language communities; games and quizzes; and all manner of other resources.

Languages on offer range from the more common French, English and Spanish to the less widely known Kurdish, Marathi and Romanian.

They also list resources for Mandarin, a language that has been earmarked by many as one to master by those who wish to benefit from the increasing global participation of mainland China in corporate ventures.

Making oneself (mis)understood

We had an evening of board games at our house tonight. Present were three Latvians who speak varying degrees of English, a South African (moi), two Swedish nationals - one with an English accent and one with a South African accent (my son and husband respectively), an Irishman and two English nationals, one of whom has a somewhat Zimbabwean accent. Quite a mixed bag!

We realised early on that we had to avoid some games because they were definitely biased towards the English speaking people present (Scene It, 30 Seconds, etc.). The evening went off very well, but there was a somewhat interesting interlude when one of the Latvians (the one with the strongest English) was playing battleships with the Irishman. She knew the rules. He didn't. So she was trying to explain them to him, but he was struggling with her accent and she was struggling to find the right words... and with his accent. Heck I struggle with his accent, too. It took me three attempts a few weeks ago to figure out what he meant when he told me that Obama had gone out for a 'borrgorr'.

Somehow the game got underway, but there were hiccups.

• When he says A and E, they sound very similar to an unpractised ear
• She calls H 'ush' while he calls it 'haitch' - so she kept thinking he was saying 8
• In Latvian, the letter I is called 'ee' (as it is in several other languages) and she kept mixing the two up

But the best was G and J. They simply could not figure out which one the other meant. She would say G and he would ask, "Juh?" To which she would respond "Yes. Juh." Of course, she was no doubt thinking of words like geography, and had no idea that we call J 'juh' and G 'guh'. Then he would say J and she would have no idea which he meant either. Fittingly enough for a church group, they settled on J for Jesus and G for God.

Then, as I drove her home later, she told me how nervous she was about driving in England, because she is used to driving on the left. I pointed out that we do drive on the left in England, but that I had always thought they drove on the right in Latvia. No, she insisted. They drive on the left. It is we who drive on the right. Since we were in the car at the time, quite clearly driving on the left side of the road, I assumed she was confusing the words for left and right. Then it dawned on me. When we talk about the side on which we drive, we refer to the side of the road on which we travel. When she does, she refers to the side of the car on which the driver sits.

As we get to know these ladies better, I foresee many such misunderstandings, and it occurs to me that a simple translation isn't always enough to ensure clarity of understanding. There are frames of reference and paradigms in play.

For those of us who are called upon to develop multilingual resources, this might well be a consideration. It might be worth having a sense check with the translator and looking for a more readily understood transliteration instead.

Speaking plain English

So it seems councils in England have been given a list of phrases and terminology that is now banned. This article identifies some of the words and phrases that are no-nos, and their suggested replacements.

I am in favour of plain speaking, and several of the phrases included in the article defy belief. Who do you suppose came up with the expression 'coterminous, stakeholder engagement'?

However, I do wonder a little about the principle behind this. To what extent does a single organisation get to control what people may and may not say? I'm not sure I see anything wrong with procurement, for example, which is not quite the same as simply buying something. There's a whole process involved in procurement, with enough red tape to close the hole in the ozone layer and more hoops than a tin of spagetti-os.

Buying is a much simpler concept: I'll have one of those, please. Certainly, sir, that will be £28.75. There you go. Thank you sir, there's your change. Ah, put it in the charity collection tin next to the till. Very generous, sir, have a nice day.

A few years ago, there was a crackdown on the language used in BBC news reports. Several words, it seems, had to go, many of them to be replaced by 'big'. We now have big instead of major, significant and serious, to name but a few. There are big increases in house prices (well, okay, there aren't at the moment, but you know what I mean), big concerns over this and big issues being addressed.

'Injured' was another word that simply had to go. Nobody gets injured anymore in news reports. They're always hurt. Confusingly, if their hurts are really big, they may become ill. To whit, "X is still ill in hospital following a big accident in which he was badly hurt."

Oh, and we no longer have collisions, we have crashes or accidents.

I'm not keen on the convoluted jargon that seems to develop around some projects, but let's not assume our listening/reading audience is collection of complete numpties, please!

pic of the day - what's in a name?

This is my name in Korean... I think. There are two Korean language students at a local facility who come and clean my house each week. They wrote their own names and mine on the whiteboard in my kitchen. I copied it, and this is the result. They graciously told me that it looked like the work of a native, but I suspect they were being, well... gracious.

A herd of collective nouns

Isn't English an odd language? I find it fascinating, of course, but (as my children assure me) I'm weird. For a non-native speaker, getting to grips with collective nouns is a nightmare. And what is the collective term for collective nouns anyway? Who knows why owls form a parliament, larks an exultation and sheep a flock? Why are geese a gaggle when they're walking and a flock when they're flying... and what are they called as they take off and some of them are airborne and others not?

My husband has been speaking English for so long that it has replaced his native Swedish as his first language. For the pedantic listener, though, there are clues that at least part of his English fluency was gained from non-native speaking parents.

One of those is that he refers to anaesthetic as if the 'th' were simply a 't'. His parents struggled to master the 'th' sound, and putting it straight after an 's' in the middle of a word like that was just plain rude! Mind you, they have no room to talk, the Swedes have an 'sj' combination that is likely to put your tongue into spasm!

The other is collective nouns. While he could probably do fairly well on a written test in which he had time to think of the correct collective nouns, conversational ebb and flow is another matter altogether. At some point he just gave up and started using 'herd' as his collective panacea. Thus:

• as we drive along a country road, we might encounter a herd of sheep
• when he is struggling against the flow of pedestrian traffic, he is barged by a herd of people
  
• when we go on holiday, his sweet blood ensures that he attacked by a herd of mosquitoes
• when the wheels fall off, he is faced with a herd of problems

But, best of all, when he heads downstairs first thing in the morning, he is preceded by a herd of cats.

See? It can be done. And, just in case you are one of the few people on the planet who hasn't seen the ad, yet, just because it's Friday: