Blogabroad
by Mary Pinckney Waters

July 18 - Linguistic Laboring

This weekend I visited my friend's family in his hometown of Furth, in southern Bavaria on the Czech border. After not understanding the first few sentences out of his father's mouth, I knew I was in for it.

At this few-weeks-remaining point in my study abroad, I've been feeling pretty good about my improvement over the past nine months. I can easily hold a conversation in German, I'm a lot more self-assured in new situations and I'm enjoying this "you can do it, little engine" feeling that's been tagging along with me into the conclusion of my study abroad.

Hello cement. This weekend the Bavarian (Bayerisch) dialect slapped this little engine across the face. It is a dialect that many non-Bavarian Germans fail to understand, much less a Hochdeutsch-speaking American. (Hochdeutsch refers to high German, the "proper" German taught in language classes.) To speak Bavarian dialect, do the following: learn German, then drop off as many letters in each word as possible and pronounce the remaining ones as weird as you can. Viola: you've mastered Bayerisch.

This weekend while I was hearing what was supposed to be German, I probably looked like I'd been shot with a horrible overdose of Botox, eyebrows raised to my hairline in absolute confoundedness. This normally confident, extroverted, middle-of-the-conversation girl was wedged between a pile of Bavarians and desperately struggling to catch the topic of conversations already going on 15 minutes without her. My brain felt like it was running a triathlon, gasping to find the sense between the one in 20 words I understood. I eventually gave up my masochistic attempts at comprehension, sitting quietly with open eyes and a closed mouth, wishing I could join in every time those around me laughed.

In the States, we too have our own accents. Nobody expects to hear "y'all," "over yonder" or "I reckon" in the North except from tourists, and Southerners wonder what those "Yankees" are talking about when they ask for a "pop" to drink. But despite some subtle differences (i.e. Southerners adding a few extra syllables to every word, or Midwesterners thinking vocal chords are located in the nose), Americans understand one another for the most part. English is English, right?

So I thought until making friends with a bunch of native-English-speaking non-Americans this semester. FYI: Not all Brits speak like Hugh Grant, who manages to actually pronounce consonants; many apparently feel that their alphabet gets along just fine with a missing handful of letters. One of my friends from Scotland has such a strong accent in English that I prefer she speak in German because I can understand her better.

I took these linguistic peculiarities for granted back home amidst American accents. On the European continent, cultures and languages don't stop and start abruptly with a country border. Cities that straddle these dividing lines are typically multi-lingual and dialects in one language often mimic sounds in neighboring countries. Residents of the Netherlands, for example, speak a language that mixes the two main tongues spoken to its north and south, English and German. Southern Germans tend to roll their r's like the nearby Italians, and Italians and Spaniards speak two different languages but have no trouble understanding one another.

You really have to hear what I'm talking about yourself. I reckon y'all will just have to go over yonder to Europe.

Mary Pinckney Waters welcomes your comments and feedback: marypwaters@yahoo.com