Watching my language

I’ve enjoyed learning languages ever since I realised it’s just a slightly more sophisticated way of doing hilarious impressions of foreigners. I had a wonderful French teacher in secondary school who, despairing of getting thirty puberty-struck boys to roll their Rs or discuss the pamplemousse, hit upon the idea of getting us to do the most exaggerated and stereotypical French accents in English, and to then transpose them into what people with letters after their names call the ‘target language’. Cue a classroom full of teenagers screaming about bread, miming riding bicycles, and singing Piaf (that one may have been me). But the thing is that it worked. The accents got better, more fluid, just more French. I suppose the reason for this is that most national stereotypes are basically true. Irish people argue passionately that we no longer have a culture based entirely on drink, then glass you in the face and vomit in your cappuccino. Brazilians have an obsession with beaches that would put Allied generals to shame. Thai people will laugh at everything: “Look, a fatal head wound!”

The only national stereotype I tend to take issue with is the one certain Americans have for Mexicans. More accurately, my problem stems from their having two. Many Americans believe that Mexicans are (a) coming to the United States to take all the jobs from good hard-working native Americans (well, not native Americans), and (b) that they are work-shy, bone-lazy good-for-nothings. When I was in the States, this caused me constant confusion: how have racist Americans managed to characterise an entire nation using two propositions that are mutually exclusive? “Them goshdarn Messcans, puttin’ us out of a job by bein’ significantly less productive, an’ thus flyin’ in the face of accepted ec’nomic theory… shit, let’s just go shoot some critters.” It’s an odd little blip in American racism, otherwise so logically sound.

So how can we put other national stereotypes to use? How can we get concrete benefits from ancestral prejudice? Simple. Every episode of ‘Allo ‘Allo, every rendition of La Cucaracha – these contain keys to ‘blending in’, to reaching that state of traveller’s nirvana idealised by the compulsive liars and Australians whose evil genius crafts those masterworks of fiction, Lonely Planet and the Rough Guide. If you succeed in blending in, they tell you, no-one will know you’re a tourist. The Japanese commuters will become blind to the fact that you’re six feet tall and blonde. The Ugandan street vendors will mistake you for a cousin. Never mind your backpack and ‘I Got Lamped In Lumpur’ t-shirt, these people will greet you like a long-lost brother, and you will curl up in the warm, welcoming bosom of your new native land. If you really want to blend in while speaking a foreign language, start by doing a seriously obvious impression of the person you’re talking to. They just might think you’re one of them. Or they might punch you. But at least that, too, will be authentic.

An odd thing happens when I speak foreign languages, but it comes from this idea of national stereotyping: deep in my little insecure heart is a little Lonely Planeteer who just wants to hang out with ‘the locals’. The upshot is that if I speak in a language that isn’t English, my personality changes drastically.

I first noticed this in France, probably while spitting on an old lady who’d tried to take my seat on the metro. My French alter ego is like me, but without that filter that keeps certain thoughts inside my head. Skip French John in a queue, and you’re likely to hear a lengthy meditation on what a cretin you are, how your hideously deformed parents met, and how your wife gives away more than Oxfam. And cheaper. French John delivers this to anyone nearby, however fixedly ahead they might stare.

I really love speaking German, and become oddly polite and enthusiastic when I do so. It’s a great language – if you’re familiar with it, you’ll know that there are only four actual words in German, and all other words are made up of appropriate combinations of the basic four. I came across a lovely one last week, as we celebrated the Virgin Mary’s Assumption, body and soul, into paradise. It’s a beautiful concept, but loses something in its German expression: Maria Himmelfahrt. This translates directly as ‘Mary Heaven Journey’. Another favourite is the contraceptive pill, which becomes die Anti-Baby Pille. German is an amazing language, but one that seems to force its logic and its eerie calm upon me when I speak it.

And now I’m in Italy. As I’m only learning the language, I haven’t yet found a settled Italian personality. I can feel it coming together, though. There are bits of French John in it – I squabble with people just to get the bit of oral practice – but there’s also a physical element, meaning that I spend a lot of my time gesturing and trying to sketch concepts in the thin unpopulated air. I know I’ll never really blend in, but it doesn’t stop me taking my coffee at the bar and feeling very proud when I’m asked for directions. I get inordinately excited about pasta and scoff at vegetarians. Most of Italian John is just a more exaggerated version of Irish John, gleeful at being culturally required to wave, shout, and obsess over cheese. Maybe, for all this talk of cultural differences, we’re all basically the same. Except for the English.