I saw a rather tedious film last week by Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inárritu. Like his previous effort “21 grams”, “Babel” pulls together a number of seemingly unrelated stories which turn out to be linked by one small anodine event. It starred Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and the delicious young Gael Garcia Bernal, the action took place in Morocco, Mexico and Japan, and was about 45 minutes too long. I think the underlying theme was about breakdown in communication. A theme which merits further study.My German refresher course will be over at the end of this month, Gott sei Dank. Having to get up early on Saturday mornings is a killer. And does Bert appear the remotest bit grateful? Überhaupt nicht. I have been spending every Saturday morning for the past couple of months at the Goethe Institut in an attempt to brush up my German to impress him. I asked him the other day whether I had made any progress. “Schatzi,” he smiled teutonically, “I loff your Britisch akzent”. Gott in Himmel, I wonder why I bother.
In my class we are about 15 students of various nationalities. About half are Belgian – a fairly straight mix of Walloon and Flemish. The Flems have better mastery of German than most of us, as Flemish has similar construction, vocabulary and sounds. The French-speaking Walloons make everyone snigger when they attempt to speak, they must sound to a German like Crabtree from ‘Allo ‘Allo. The other half of the class is a mixed bag of assorted Eastern Europeans, a Swede, a Spaniard and moi. We communicate with each other in very poor German. I don’t think anyone is making much progress, despite the stalwart efforts of our teacher, the formidable Frau Doktor Klampwangler.
Here in The Big Sprout almost everyone speaks at least two languages, and many people speak three or more. Not necessarily well, but we all manage to communicate. 
However, when you have heard an Estonian and a Greek chatting in appalling English, it makes you worry about the future lingua franca of the melting-pot which is Brussels. I can see a day when Eurocrats will communicate with each other across the language barrier in a jumble of bad English, bad French, bad Spanish, with smatterings of bad Romanian, bad Polish, bad Portuguese, etc., but which everyone (here at least) will understand. Is this something to be welcomed or prevented?
The three official languages of the European Union for documents and meetings are English, French and German, although German has taken a back seat, and following the accession of the “new” European countries, English has usurped French as the favoured official language. The French are in high dudgeon about this, having held linguistic pride of place ever since the inception of the EEC. President Chirac famously swept out of a meeting in a huff last year because the French head of the employers’ federation chose to speak in English.
Artificial languages such as Esperanto and Interlingua have never caught on, as there are no native speakers to teach them competently. Following the last Eurovision Song Contest a study was commissioned comparing Finnish to Klingon and finding some uncanny similarities. What is being spoken in Brussels today is a naturally developing form of communication based on existing languages, evolving every day, quite informal and with no rules. But the important thing is, everybody seems to understand it. And, in the words of the immortal Mr Ian Dury, das ist gut, c’est magnifique.
24 comments:
Sehr gut, einfach ausgezeichnet, Daphne. Who needs Esperanto when everyone speaks Engrish?
If you think German's bad, Lady Daphne, try gorillese. All low gutteral sounds, blowing and lip-smacking. I'll teach you a few words when you visit. The Klingons are ill-mannered carnivores, not a bit like gorillas. A lady from Cheltenham called Lynn left a message on my blog (Jan 5th post) implying that she knew you, yet her blog is not linked here. Very mysterious.
Don't you just loff his Sherman akzent?
I'm fascinated by languages, the way they change...morph. It doesn't matter what the language boards 'prescribe', people will just do what the heck they want to do and linguists can only describe.
Mr Ian Dury then carried on to say "hit me, hit me" - are you trying to be kinky, daffers ?
We must met this week, we can talk in any language you choose. . .I've practiced my nod and email technique well.
Don't forget Bill Wymans classic "Je suis un rock star". It was a formidable example of franglais.
I guess it's acceptable for the eurobrats to communicate in a sort of pidgin for now, at least until they see the light and all speak proper English like wot i does.
Oh good! I'll cancel all my foreign lingo lessons and carry on.
I have never understood the difference between Flemish and Walloon. Is there anything comparable to help my feeble brain grasp it?
With a million or more speakers, Esperanto has indeed "caught on" to some extent, and is still going 120 years after it started. The reason why it hasn't caught on more has nothing to do with there being no native speakers, since there *are* a few hundred of those. No, it's largely because most people are misinformed about Esperanto and have odd ideas about why it "can't work." The headquarters of the Universala Esperanto Asocio is not so far from Brussels, in Rotterdam.
At this moment Ian D is on Radio 2 with'Hit me' and I thought of you.
1 million speakers of Esperanto? Hell, even Flemish has more than that!
As mkwm said at the top here, who needs Esperanto/Interlingua/Klingon when the whole world desperately wants to speak English? (With the possible exception of the French).
pat, the flems speak flemish, a dutch dialect and the walloons speak frog, a french dialect.
the dutch understand the flems although many try not to, and the frogs understand the walloons, although many try not to. both flemish and walloon are considered inferior to their mother language, but if you ask me, the belgians have greatly simplified french for us.
Zoe depicted the situation perfectly well. Here in Belgium, we learn French or Dutch as a second language.
I've been listening to Mr Todd speaking Esperanto, it sounds like a Roman language and I could understand quite a lot. However, it doesn't appeal to me at all.
Anyway, French & English are fair enough to communicate worldwide, let alone sign language and Music, the international language par excellence.
Thanks Zoe.
Very well explained Zed.
Todd (welcome by the way) - how do you get to be a "native speaker" of Esperanto? Artificially, presumably. Or is there a magic kingdom somewhere where Esperanto is the official language? The man who invented Esperanto was Polish, and if you can get your teeth around that language, you can speak anything.
Back home in blighty, I can claim to speak French, German and Spanish better than probably 95% of the population. However, when compared to Belgium, I speak them about as well as a slightly backward infant. So when I do try and converse in one of these languages, I rapidly run out of vocabluary, so we end up back in English. J'essaye, mais j'échoue(beaucoup).
Hahaha...
Lynx, Daphne Wayne-Bough: Read a little about esperanto
www.2-2.se
www.esperanto.net
Daphne, I have to take exception to your description of Mr Dury as 'immortal'.
He's fooking dead, woman.
Perhaps, Tippler, but still effing and blinding from On High, I bet.
Ahh Daffers Darling, you never stop by anymore, especially after me going to the effort of making the place look all nice for you. . .
We had a zulu woman staying with us recently who told me that in Johannesburg the lingua franca is a mixture of Zulu, one of the other clicking tribal languages, Afrikaans and English. If there is a gap in your knowledge of any of these languages it makes getting by in the city difficult but, as South Africans are usually conversant, if not always literate, in all these languages there is no problem in communicating.
It sounds sore-head-giving to me.
I've never been fond of the German language. To me it's harsh and inherently violent with all these barks. It is a language in which all plosives remind me of flying bricks, and such mild exhortations as "Please pass the salt" sound like "Invade Poland!" or "You vill follow ze ohdahs!
Creaky old stereotypes? Certainly not. Grumble, mutter.
DQ, sorry darling but I'm up to my eyes at the mo, haven't got a second to write my own, let alone read anyone else's. Nothing personal, I'll drop by as soon as I get time.
Sam, Africans are the world's natural linguists. In West Africa alone there are hundreds of local languages as well as English and French. In tribal society the interpreter has a very important place and a special staff with a motif on it indicating his role. He is always close to the Chief in order to facilitate discussions with other tribal groups. And these are the people we used to treat as primitive - they all grow up multilingual.
German can apparently be very beautiful when applied to poetry. However, I would have no luck persuading Bert to read me Die Lorelei, the best he could manage would be to text it to me.
Me too Daphne - me too! Visit I mean.
Daphne, native Esperanto speakers are "created" in exactly the same way native speakers of any other language are created: by their parents using this language to talk to the children as in some families Esperanto is spoken as the home language. I don't know many people from other non-English spoken countries who speak English well enough to communicate as easily as I do with people from all over the world in Esperanto. English is just so much harder to learn and everywhere it's pronounced so differently that it's impractical as an international language and besides it would not be neutral, the French wouldn't like it and honestly... me neither! ;P
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