Language Regrets (Part 1)

Not many

I don’t have many regrets but one is that I was not brought up bilingual. Though what language I would have learnt is not clear.

My home environment

When they first met, my parents spoke French, which was their only common language, but it was a second language for both of them (at that stage my father claimed to be Polish). Most bilingual people learn the first language of each parent at home, no matter what country they live in. And maybe also the languages of their grandparents. I have friends where the husband is Spanish but was educated in Russian in Ukraine (not sure where he learnt English), and the wife is Irish but bilingual in English and German. Their kids grew up in Ukraine but are fluent in all of the languages. Recently they moved to Lebanon, so they will pick up Arabic, except that now with the war they are in Brussels.

My father never became fluent in English, but he could converse convincingly in French, German (in an Austrian dialect) and Polish, and could definitely read French and German. From living in Brussels, he could also speak some Flemish. We knew he could manage in Portuguese, as he had lived in Brazil for a few months. A linguist friend I took home once checked him out for other languages: Russian/Ukrainian, Spanish, Dutch, Hungarian, Romanian.

The worst problem for him was his “foreign” accent, which made him difficult to understand. There were no other foreigners in the village, so nobody got any practice in understanding wrongly stressed or badly pronounced English. The late 1940s and early 1950s clearly was not the time to appear in Britain speaking German. He had some interesting idioms like getting sunburnt was “getting browned off”. Logical but not quite the same as the meaning in English of “being bored or fed up”. Once my partner asked me to translate what he had said, as he had no clue, but I understood him perfectly without noticing any mistakes. As a result, I am very tolerant of people learning English, or other non-BBC English, such as local dialects, or the English taught in Russian schools where there was no contact with foreigners to update the English read in Dickens. Or even the international form of English used in the EU.

What stopped us learning French from them both? We lived with my mother’s father at the time, and I think he probably discouraged hearing French, fearing my parents were using it to talk about him (which they probably were). Also probably my father was finding hard enough to learn English, without teaching us another language. He wasn’t a patient person and had no teaching skills that we knew of. When it was suggested he at least try with me, I escaped quickly and he gave up. I guess he just spoke to us in English because we understood, and it was easier.

What we learnt from him was a mixture of words from several languages, which we absorbed in a natural way, not realising till we got to school and started reading, that other kids did not say things like “frap frap” or “tok tok” for a knock at the door, or talk about going to the “Badekammer”, or even taking a Taschentuch iz karmana (handkerchief out of your pocket) a mixture of German and Ukrainian. And I still can catch myself saying “atchapu” instead of “atishoo”. As we learnt German at school we could observe that he counted in German under his breath, before announcing a number in English. We also learnt that other families didn’t “broddle” (stir up or rake) the open fire that heated our house. Eventually we realised that this was not a local dialect word but probably came from Flemish/Dutch via my father.

He took to visiting the doctor in the village as this was the only person he could talk to in French. There were few foreigners in the nearby town, but he would meet the Jewish furrier and drink real Italian coffee at the Italian “Brucciani’s cafe”. He would go for a drink sometimes in Yates Wine Lodge, where he met the Poles who had arrived during or after the war. Once his claim to be Polish was challenged, and he got a black eye in a fight over it.

Every week he brought home Paris Match and Der Stern, so we always had reading material in those languages. We absorbed quite a lot even by looking at the pictures. I remember my father being quite disappointed when he found some pictures of the royal family had been physically cut out (censored) during some royal scandal probably about Princess Margaret. This reading French at an early age seems to be the reason I can read French documents for work without much trouble, and even some simple novels.

Northern English dialects

My mother had not lived in the small village in Lancashire before she got married, and had moved around England quite a lot, so I was never aware she had any regional accent. We picked up the local dialect from the kids we played with. So that got integrated into the English we spoke with a strong local accent, which I tried to lose when I got to London, so as not to appear a country bumpkin amongst all the “posh” people. As a teenager I had a Saturday job in a shoe repair shop that had branches all over Lancashire. In the summer I was sent to be a holiday relief in several of the branches, where I learnt to distinguish local dialects even between towns, by their special words and phrases.

In the days before television, regional accents were not heard on the BBC. But novels began to portray working class heroes (with unsuccessful attempts generally at dialects).

But as people got TVs, “kitchen sink” dramas appeared. The start of the soap opera TV series “Coronation St” set in Salford (then a seedy part of Manchester), was revolutionary and is still going strong. Maybe it was unintellible to southerners at first!

Not having to speak languages perfectly

One of the most important lessons I learnt was you don’t have to be fluent, to be able to communicate with people. I learnt this first when I heard an American friend speak French fluently (equals fast, and without searching for words) but with an atrocious accent. It seemed he could be understood. This was an eye-opener to me, I don’t know why, after my father.

Street level language is often enough. I’m not sure my father was fluent in all the languages he knew, and some he probably learnt in the market at home, just I understand a mixture of Polish or Russian or Lithuanian from the market here. But his market probably had Jews, Romanians, Austrians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Ruthenians and Ukrainians as well as Poles. So a much wider language environment. See the map on a previous post here.