My relationship with the English language is complicated. For one thing, I love it: I study English language and literature and enjoy doing so, and I also speak, think, and dream in English. However, I also speak English because my parents brought me to a land colonized by people who spoke English and forced English upon the peoples indigenous to that land. Furthermore, I myself was born and spent much of my childhood in a colonized country where many different languages and dialects are spoken, where speaking English is attached to a certain kind of person, and being “inglesera” is usually not said with fondness.
I find myself confronting every facet of my complicated relationship with the English language while I am abroad, despite the fact that I am visiting not only an English-speaking country, but England itself. In every corner of Britain that I have visited so far, I have been forced to face the fact that the way I speak and the words I use betray me as a foreigner.
Something an American tourist told me in Glasgow about an interaction she’d had with a native Scot:
“Accent? I don’t have an accent, you have an accent!”
My philosophy about being a tourist is that I enjoy being a tourist: I don’t shy away from big tourist spots like Buckingham Palace or the Brooklyn Bridge, and I bristle when people complain that these places are “flooded with tourists” and complaining while they are tourists themselves, but I also dislike looking like a tourist, especially as a solo traveller. So, I do not dress like a backpacker, I don’t carry around a camera, and I avoid paper maps like the plague, but I find that my accent betrays me. I am not usually shy when interacting with strangers, but I found myself suddenly speaking quietly whenever I had to interact with native Londoners, because I was so aware that my rhotic dialect makes me stand out in conversation.
Something I overheard in London, said by someone with a North American accent:
“The French could speak English, but they choose not to.”
Collectively, my flat-mates have a working understanding of upwards of eight languages. Having grown up somewhat bilingual, but never having learned a language to a working proficiency (we’ll find out how functional my French is when I visit Paris in July), I have so much admiration for people who learn languages in their adulthood. I have especial admiration for people who learn English, which has rules that even I am still learning, and—as my flat-mate aptly put it—is “so idiomatic”.
The problem with English being so widely spoken, so dominant, is that it does not give native speakers much reason to learn other languages. My multilingual European flat-mates, upon listening to me and my American dialect pine for the knowledge of other languages, say: “But you speak English!” as if it’s enough, and I suppose it is, and yet I know that it isn’t.
More things I’ve heard:
- From a Spaniard working in Glasgow hoping to work in Canada someday: “I came to Scotland to improve my English for when I move to Canada, but the Scottish accents… … whenever I meet an American or a Canadian I love listening to them talk!”
- From my mom, to her goddaughter raised in England: “Do you have an accent?! Jia says you have an accent.”
- From an American tourist in Glasgow: “Now… I mean… I hope this doesn’t offend you, but… I’m sorry, I don’t think you have a Canadian accent at all!”
- And finally, on an episode of Rick and Morty, which I was watching thanks to my flatmates: “As they say in Canada, peace oot!”