Re: Questionable Language
I was trolling around as usual this morning, when I came across this entry on Daniel’s blog: it recounts a typical polylingual email conversation of the type he is prone to initiate. Now, Daniel and I are about as inseparable as two people who live on opposite coasts can be, and have been for several years. I know for a fact that he’s fluent in Russian, Hebrew, and English, and not at all fluent in German and French (a good deal of our friendship is based on the mutual love of language, especially languages we don’t speak but like to pretend we do).
Imagine my shock, however, when I realized that most of it was being conducted in Spanish. That sly bastard, I thought. All this time he was feigning ignorance of the language.
(Of course, to my relief, later on he mentions that he’d been using http://www.freetranslation.com/.)
Anyhow, this started me thinking about my policy of never letting on to anyone how many languages I can follow. You’re better off pretending to be a typical monolingual American. Why is this so? Well, let me tell you.
I once heard Eddie Izzard say that people’s impression of you is %70 how you look, %20 how you sound, and only %10 what you say. When you start dealing with people in languages (or even accents) other than your own, your proficency in that language trumps everything.
My sister brought her boyfriend from England to my sister’s wedding, where he met the whole family for the first time. My otherwise intelligent Texan family completely lost their minds. All they could talk about were shows they liked on PBS, techno DJ’s they liked, and in the case of my big goofy cousin, the Revolutionary War. He took it all with good humor and a great deal of underlying condescension. This is the typical mode non-American people use to deal with Americans. Use it to your advantage.
Once you start to speak other people’s languages, expectations change dramatically. Suddenly, your Americanisms become not so much cute as they are unsophisticated; you’re just a foreigner, what the hell do you know about anything?
Even more ugly is the class distinction between those who speak with an accent and those who don’t. I remember a while ago a colleague from Malaysia (who was educated in British private schools and spoke English beautifully) and I were making idle conversation about a client. This client had a PhD from Harvard, had lived in the US for twenty years, and was just about as assimilated as anyone, except he had an accent. My colleague made appoint to mention how good the client’s English was. The client had actually been in country for longer than my colleague, and was actually educated here, but his accent made my colleague feel sort of superior to him.
Therefore, if anyone asks, I’m just a dumb ol’ ‘Merican. Feel free to speak your native tongue, especially if you want to say things you don’t want me to hear.
10:28:38 AM 
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