Tag Archives: language

23. Meeting Sean

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I’m walking along the Grand Union Canal that runs behind the estate where my father-in-law lives. It’s a glorious evening and I’m on a video call with Katie who is away on the south coast this week with Lily and their uncle and aunt. I walk past four or five narrow boats. On the last boat in the row, a modest white and blue steel boat, a man is standing. I have the phone up, so he thinks I’m filming him or taking his photograph. He gives me a big smile and says something. But I’m talking to Katie, so there’s some confusion. He then realises that I’m not taking his picture and I realise that he’s talking to me. More than that, I hear his Irish accent and he hears mine.

“Where are you from?” he asks. “Kildare,” I reply. “Ah, a Lillywhite,” he says and I know immediately that I am firm ground. Despite his Dublin accent, he tells me he’s from Dungarvan in Co. Waterford. “The husband of one of my best friends is from Dungarvan,” I tell him. I tell Katie I’ll call her later because I have a feeling I might be chatting here for a while.

Sean and I chat for an hour, me standing on the grassy tow-path, he on the open deck of his narrow boat, the air cooled engine exposed to the evening air. We discover we have people and places in common. He pootled a narrow boat up to the harbour in Edenderry in the late 1960s and remembered going for a drink at The Harbour House. That was my uncle Tom’s favourite haunt, owned by Mary O’Connor, my Irish teacher, and her family. I was only in The Harbour House once, for a pint of Guinness with Tom back in the early 1990s. It was everything you would expect of a small Irish pub, all the old men lined up at the bar. It was renowned for its music and for Mary being as strict behind the bar as she was in the classroom.

Sean tells me about his job at Shannon airport and about people from Edenderry he knew there and at Ardnacrusha power station. I mention people I know who he might have known and we laugh when we get a bit tangled in Johns and Seans and who was who.

I tell him I had been a sailor and we talk about the joys of my Westerly Conway. He wonders how a girl from the Bog of Allen and a boy from the housing estate 20 metres from here could have ended up living on a boat and sailing to the places we did. He tells me of his adventures as a sea sailor and as a narrow boat owner and about his sustainable, no-cost approach to life.

At 80 years of age, he is only a few years younger that Daddy would have been. The Cuban Missile Crisis comes up in conversation (he makes me promise not to tell anyone why) and he shares his reminiscences of those few days in 1962 and I tell him what Daddy told me of his memories and fears of those days.

He explains how he has come to have that Dublin accent but says his heart remains firmly rooted in Dungarvan. He already owns a plot in Dungarvan graveyard where he wishes to be buried when his time comes.

“I had a half pint at the Cape of Good Hope a while ago,” he tells me, referring to the pub just a couple of hundred metres away. “When I went to the bar, I heard two men behind me. A Mayo man and a Galway man. Sure, I had to talk to them. The Mayo man was a bull man.”

“A bull man?” I ask, perplexed. “Ah, you’re too young,” he says. He explains what a ‘bull man’ is and realisation dawns. “Ah,” I say, “You mean the AI man. That’s what we call it where I come from.” He laughs and says how funny that we had that in Ireland where the Catholic church didn’t allow such things for humans. AI, for those of you not in the know, means, artificial insemination, and the Bull man or the AI man was, and remains, an integral part of our dairy and beef industries.

My daughters always tease me when I speak to other Irish people, accusing me of changing the way I talk and the way I hold myself. They’re not wrong. But I don’t do it on purpose. When I’m with other Irish people I become the version of myself that is the oldest part of me. I speak in the way I learned to speak as a baby, in the first accent I ever heard from the people and the place where I grew up. It is the accent, grammar, syntax and vocabulary that I am most comfortable with. There’s no modulation, no register change, no code switching. I am me at my most comfortable.

We all change our registers in different contexts. For instance, the way we speak to small children is not the same as the way we speak in the corporate office. The way we speak in church is not the same as on the terraces of the football stadium. But changing accents is something different. Over the years, I have modulated not only my accent, but the words I use when in conversation and the order in which I say them. Why? Well, for two reasons – one that I am comfortable with, the other less so.

For most of my life, I have chosen to live among people for whom English is not a first language. Therefore, to make myself understood among English speakers in Japan, Nunavut, Spain, and elsewhere, I slow down, speak carefully, use very standardized words and phrases to be understood and to make the person I am speaking to feel more comfortable. That is now second nature to me.

The other reason is that, over the years, I have been very aware of people making fun of my Irish accent – people laughing and repeating my pronunciation, my use of certain phrases or my Hiberno-English sentence structures. In order to reduce the feeling of discomfort (and anger) that this fun-making and ridicule causes in me, I modulate and change register. It’s just easier. I don’t like it, but it is how it is. That too is now second nature to me when I am around native English speakers who are not Irish.

But, when I speak to other Irish people, I can feel my body physically relax. I don’t have to think of an alternative phrase or word for ‘give out’, ‘press’, my use of bring/take, my pronunciation of H and th, or a thousand other usages of words and phrases. I’m not going to be laughed at for calling my parents Mammy and Daddy. I can throw in a reference to the GAA or to Eamon Casey or to the Angelus or to a million other things, and no further explanation is required. I can just be.

All migrants, no matter what their language or their circumstances, experience this distance from their first voice. Some people are happy to leave that first voice behind. I am privileged to have had so many opportunities to travel in my life. I have learned so many wonderful ways to speak and to see the world through the eyes of others. But speaking in the way that is oldest to my being is like relaxing into a large warm bath.

Sean is stuck along this stretch of the canal for the time being, as he waits for a lock gate farther along to be repaired. I tell him that if he’s still there the next time I walk that way, I’ll invite him down to the Cape of Good Hope for a beer. Who knows? Maybe the AI man will be there.

Stretch of the Grand Union Canal in Warwick

Yo soy Manuel

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Last week I wrote about the joys of multilingualism and it would be remiss of me to not follow that up with some of the pitfalls of attempted bilingualism. Having lived in Spain since 2014, I feel true empathy for Manuel in Falty Towers. In fact, at times, I am Manuel. Learning another language opens one up to making all sorts of unfortunate mistakes. I have two particular favourites that I’ve heard from other people.Manuel

One is about a young woman from New Zealand who was the youngest and only female crew member of a yacht that was about to set sail across the Pacific from Peru. The young woman was given the task of provisioning the boat with enough beer for a crew of six or seven, for up to two months at sea. With her pockets bulging with cash, she went to the nearest supermarket and bought tray upon tray of cans of beer with a name that seemed, to her eyes, quite wild. She duly bought the beer, brought it back to the yacht and stowed it, in preparation for setting sail. It was only with 60 miles of ocean separating the yacht from the Peruvian coast, when the first cans of beer were cracked open, was it realized that she had bought sin-alcohol, or, in English, alcohol-free, beer. While the sailing may have been improved, the onboard atmosphere was not.

My other favourite story was told to me by a Welshman who lives on the opposite side of Andalucia. It’s very easy to mix up similar sounding words with dire consequences. This guy met his next-door neighbor one day and, instead of telling her he had been to visit her cuño (brother-in-law), he told her he’d been to visit her coño (pussy). Lucky for him, his neighbor has a good sense of humour, but he’s never lived it down and is reminded of it every time there is a neighbourhood get-together.

I’m not above making gaffes myself. I once went to a birthday party and mixed up the words regalo and regla. I arrived to the 3-year old’s birthday party with Lily and Katie, only to discover we’d left the present aboard Carina. As I sprinted down the hill I turned to the child’s mother and the three or four women she was chatting to. Instead of saying ‘I forgot the present’, I told them all ‘I forgot my period’.

My most recent major gaffe was one of misunderstanding and I sincerely hope the person I was talking to didn’t catch my gaffe. It happened about three months ago. We’d been having ongoing problems with our boiler. I’d phone the landlady, she’d phone her insurance company and they’d send a boiler repairman out. He’d fix the problem only for the boiler to stop working a few days later. This happened three or four times. During all of this, my landlady communicated with me via my next-door neighbor, who lives with her 97-year old mother and who happens to be my landlady’s cousin. It’s generally easier to communicate face-to-face in a second language than over the phone.

That morning we had the latest boiler breakdown and I phoned the landlady. I taught English that afternoon and came home, frazzled. My leg ached and I’d just had an awful hour with a bunch of 3-year olds. Lola kept sneezing out long viscous streams of disgusting snot that I had to wipe up. Irene asked to go to the toilet and when she didn’t return after 10 minutes I went to investigate. She’d done a poo but didn’t know how to wipe her bottom, so I had to do it for her. While I was busy wiping her arse all hell broke loose in the classroom. I didn’t sign up for this when I agreed to teach English to these kids.

When I arrived home, I went straight to the bedroom to change my clothes, as I always do at the end of the day. When I was half-dressed, I heard an insistent knock at the door. I hopped to the door (on my bad leg), half in-half out of my clothes. My friends and their giant puppy were standing at the door. I invited them in and said I just needed a minute to get dressed. They said they’d wait outside, on account of the dog. So, I returned to getting dressed. A moment later, there was another insistent knock on the door. ‘What do they want now?’ I wondered and opened the door again. My friends were still standing there, but they hadn’t knocked. Instead, it was a woman I recognized as someone who regularly visits my neighbor and her 97-year old mother. You’ll have to understand, I was quite wound up by now and probably in need of a strong cup of tea, so I didn’t quite take in everything the woman was saying to me. I caught the words ‘pain’, ‘doctor’, ‘4 o’clock tomorrow afternoon’. I put 2 and 2 together and came up with, erm, about three hundred and five.

With my friends and their giant puppy looking on, I put my hand on the woman’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m very sorry’. She looked at me strangely.

‘Is she in hospital or at home?’ I asked.

‘At home’, the woman said, and seemed very confused.

‘I’ll definitely be there tomorrow’, I said. ‘4 o’clock, right?’

Why was she looking at me so strangely?

‘Was she in much pain?’ I asked. ‘How’s Manoli?’ (for that is the name of my next-door neighbor).

By now the woman was looking at me so strangely, that I knew I had very seriously got the wrong end of the stick.

‘I’m sorry’, I said. ‘Can you explain all this to me again. I don’t understand’.

The woman then slowly and carefully explained that Manoli had a toothache and was in pain and didn’t want to leave the house. And she had asked this woman to convey to me that the boiler repairman would come at 4 o’clock the next afternoon.

Rather sheepishly, I thanked the woman for conveying the news. I sincerely hoped she didn’t catch my gaffe and couldn’t see the machinations of my brain as I considered what I would wear to the funeral at 4 o’clock the next day and what ingredients I had in the house to make a cake to bring around to the wake.

I really need to improve my Spanish.

Tower of Babel got a bad rap

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Those of us who live in predominantly monolingual English-speaking parts of the world are particularly poor when it comes to speaking other languages. We make excuses, such as ‘I don’t have an aptitude for languages’ or we convince ourselves that we can’t do it. The fact is, we have the luxury of speaking an international language, and that makes us lazy and scared. Our language is the majority language of North America, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK, and an official or minority language in large parts of Africa, India, Oceania and elsewhere. In addition, many northern Europeans speak English as a second language. And let us not forget the millions of indigenous peoples worldwide who have been forced to adopt English to the detriment of their own languages. From our privileged position, we English speakers tend to view monolingualism as normal. But it is a one-sided privilege. When we travel abroad, we expect others to communicate with us in our language, without realising that our dogged monolingualism necessitates others’ bilingualism.

Far from people having or not having an aptitude for languages, bilingualism and multilingualism are the norm. South Africa, for example, has 11 official languages and recognises 8 other regional languages. I have met South Africans who can fluently speak five or six languages and have a smattering of three or four more. This is common. Papua New Guinea has over 850 indigenous languages, many from unrelated language families, and yet, the majority of Papua New Guineans are multilingual. I have friends from mainland Europe who can easily converse in Swedish, Dutch, German, English and French.

We are all born with an innate ability to speak language, but the form that language takes is moulded by our culture. There is nothing in our DNA that makes us capable of only speaking one language. One of the driving forces behind our decision to settle in Sanlúcar was our desire to give our children the opportunity to learn a second language. When we moved here, I had a poor grasp of French, an even poorer grasp of Japanese and Irish, and a smattering of Inuktitut. Julian had a similar grasp of French, Spanish and German. Neither of us were in a position (as home-schoolers at the time) to instil in our children a solid grounding in any language other than English.

The opportunity to enrol the girls in a small rural school, where they would be immersed in Spanish (Andalucian) language and culture, was not one to turn down. The girls were five and six years old when they started school and they didn’t speak a word of Spanish. They’re eight and nine now, and are pretty much fluent. Lily is equally comfortable in either language, while Katie finds it easier to read and write in Spanish.

What I didn’t anticipate when we made the decision to enrol our children in school in a small Spanish village was how multilingualism would become the norm for them. We are not the only immigrants to this beautiful part of the world. Here on the Rio Guadiana, we have friends and acquaintances from Holland, Lithuania, Germany, France, Belgium and Japan. The river separates Spain and Portugal. I’ll never forget Lily’s birthday party last year, where eight little girls ate pizza and played on the beach and between them spoke Spanish, French, Dutch and English. Their waiter was Portuguese. My children are often in the homes of their Dutch, Lithuanian or Japanese friends, immersed in the language of those homes. It’s a wonderful thing.

I’m not expecting my daughters to become fluent Lithuanian or Japanese speakers any time soon. Rather, their immersion in those environments normalises multilingualism. They become used to and comfortable with being in spaces where their language does not dominate. They accept that people change languages depending on to whom they are speaking and the topic of conversation. They understand that, when someone is speaking a language they do not understand, they are not doing so in order to exclude. And they are learning that language expresses culture and some things are not easily translatable from one language to another.

Language is a powerful and beautiful human trait. And every language opens up a new window on the world. We made a good decision when we dropped anchor in this multilingual little corner of the world.