[We wrote a personal article for my Magazine Writing class this week and my professor encouraged me to write about the linguistic challenges I've faced in this country. This is what I came up with.] I’m sitting in a taxi in a foreign country on my way to the place I’m about to call home for the next nine months. Beside me, a middle-aged driver is trying to make small talk. I say trying because it’s a pretty one-sided conversation at this point, specifically his side. He is very kind and is giving me lots of advice for the school year… I think.
I’m hanging on to his every word and I could have sworn when I got in the cab that we were speaking the same language, but as we have settled into the conversation, I can’t understand a thing he’s saying. His words dance around my jetlagged mind and I keep wondering if this man is speaking English or just making vaguely English-sounding noises. I’ve already said “What?” to him at least 20 times and I’m sure he’s starting to think that I’m stupid. I’m in a foreign country, but that country is England and I come from the United States. Never did I imagine that after speaking English all my life I would struggle as much as I am to communicate with a fellow English speaker. My eventual solution during the cab ride is to start nodding and smiling. And I’m just hoping that he doesn’t ask me any more questions, because I might cry if I have to say “What?” one more time. Back in January, I decided to study abroad for the school year. It took an aching amount of paperwork and quite a few headaches, but I somehow ended up here at the University of Sunderland. I thought I was making things easier for myself by going to another English speaking country. What I didn’t take into account was how diverse English can be as a language. Speaking with the same letters and words doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to sound similar or even use those words for the same things. I’m told that as far as understanding the English language goes, the Northeast is not the best area for an American. Even other English folk from more southern places struggle to understand ‘Mackem,’ the slang speech of Sunderland. The method that I’ve developed to navigate this northern bastardization of the English language is called the “smile and nod.” When I’m speaking to a northerner (especially far north, especially with loud music playing in the background, and especially if one or two drinks have been consumed by the speaking party before the conversation), there are entire sentences that I lose. When this occurs, I smile and nod and hope that an active response is not required. It has about a 55 per cent success rate. This strategy has helped me through a few conversations, but more and more people are catching on. I smile and nod, raising my eyebrows like I’m really interested in what this person has to say. They smile back, also raising their eyebrows, but in a way that requests a response. I keep smiling and nodding, panic creeping into my eyes as we both realize that I’m entirely lost. “You didn’t catch any of that, did you?” Nope. For whatever reason, many English people do not seem to be interested in properly pronouncing words. Syllables blur together, letters have different sounds. And there are only so many times I can repeat “What?” before I start to feel like a idiot. That is without even mentioning all the slang words (like ‘marra’), the similar words that have different meanings (chips and crisps/candy and sweets) and the fact that everyone keeps asking me if I’m all right as a greeting. English may be my first language, but I’m not so sure what is being spoken around here. It is a challenge, but a few weeks have passed since that cab ride and I am already doing better. In fact, during my most recent ride with a (different) middle-aged driver, I can proudly say I understood a solid 83 per cent of what he was saying. This may have simply been because he had less of an accent, but I like to think it was because I’m improving my Mackem comprehension. The speech in Sunderland and England in general can be bizarre and it does feeling like people are speaking a foreign language sometimes. That doesn’t mean I can’t learn the local dialect. I have to focus a bit more when people (especially middle-aged cab drivers) are talking. But I’m adapting and learning. And who knows? Maybe I’ll be Mackem-fluent by the time my year abroad is over.
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Amy Golden
Amy will be spending the academic year at the University of Sunderland in England studying journalism. Archives
February 2018
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