Motley's cruise

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So I find myself pondering life in Korea, as I ride the KTX on its 450+ km journey to Seoul. One thing I am thankful for is cheap transport! I think this same distance ride in Europe would be in excess of 150 Euros, and in Japan, easily 20,000 Yen!

I think about how I have spent 5+ years of my life living as an expat, from The Caymans, to Spain; India to Korea. The fortunate circumstance I find myself in is the opportunity to share my language not just with foreign language learners (let's call them L2), but with native-English speakers. A recent conversation I had with a young lady (expat) and her love for accents and dialects got me thinking about it anew, and particularly my experiences. Short of doing an auto-bio, it would be difficult to constrain my commentary to a mere blog post, but I shall endeavour...

My love for languages definitely stems from immigrant parents, and in particular, my mother. When we were young, just entering school, she wanted to put us in a Mandarin school. She recognised 35 years + ago that Chinese was going to be a major player on the world's stage, and particularly its language. However, in Vancouver during the late 70's, there was not the demand to open Mandarin-speaking schools. Still, today there is only 1 Mandarin school in the VSB inventory, yet Asians make up 51% of the population in the GVRD. So our mother, the true visionary that she was/is, registered us in what is still the prevailing second language immersion in BC - French.

My mother, who used to spend her wilder, more carefree days visiting the Russian merchant ships with a friend of hers, playing poker, learning the most guttural of Russian dialects, pounding back the potato mash, went with the noblest of intentions: to learn Russian from 'true' Russians. On the other hand, her friend, already a polyglot who speaks over 17 languages fluently, likely had different thoughts with the sailors. My mother imbued in us the idea that to learn, "please, thank you, hello, good-bye" in the local language would ingratiate you to its people. On some level, I still believe this (grumpy old ajummas aside)axiom.

I spent a large portion of my youth, however, resenting the way my mother spoke English. Sober and sentient, she spoke English like everyone else I knew. However, get some of that strange substance into her that contained orange juice and some clear liquid from a tall bottle she called 'booze' - a mix I heard referred to as a 'screwdriver' - and she would start to talk all silly like. So by the age of about 4, I knew that 'booze' made Mom stupid and funny sounding. I resented her for it. I thought that she became somebody that she was not, and I disliked that.

Then I met Amanda. She was my coffee girl. I met her at the Second Cup, just off the UofA campus. She was spiking my lattes with skim milk, instead of the 1% I ordered. It is said that one forms a special bond with one's coffee girl, and that was certainly the case with her. Damn near/should have married her. We were together for 2 years, but eventually went our separate ways. Amanda had something different about the way she spoke English, and over several orders of lattes, the 20 seconds that I had to interact with her as she steamed my milk and poured my coffee before the next order, I learned that she was originally from South Africa. She had moved to Canada at about 13 years old. My mom moved to Canada when she was 12. Huh...Well, fast forward about a year, we are living together. We had a run in with a Canadian Airlines Rep who claimed that the fact the airline lost our luggage was our fault. Amanda lost it. Flipped. Snapped. And the way she spoke changed. I didn't recognise her, save by how she would get kind of high pitched when she was excited. It was like her doppelganger. Same woman, different accent. And it turned me on. Maybe that ended up being our downfall. As we started to fight more as the relationship went on, out would come her accent, and I couldn’t stay mad at her. I was distracted by that hot accent. Maybe I started pitching for fights just to hear that hot South African accent.

I am starting a new paragraph because I cannot bear to tell that story and then mention my mother in that same paragraph. So then, I understood how accents can fade, get suppressed, but can come out when one does not 'monitor' or filter. As a child, I child, I had a horrible speech impediment and could not say my rs. My father would bug me mercilessly, “Julien, say ‘Robert the Red Rabbit rode the rapid rocket.’” I sounded like a New Yorker. Such was my agony. Then I entered French Immersion, and that cured my r problem. I compensated with the velar r, used in French. Now and again, when I am really tired, or super drunk, you’ll hear me slip. Then again, most inebriates are incoherent, so I am able to remain mostly undetected by discerning ears.
One of my early English differences I recall is my boss in the Cayman Islands. He is a Brit. We also worked with some Americans, more Brits, and a few Aussies. Whenever thing would start to get stressful, he would pipe, "New DOOOT ABOOOOT IT!" This would get a rise out of all who worked there, all anglophones alike (including the local Caymanians). It would be lost on our French and Italian customers, likely because they had never seen the commercial.
More recently I think of my time in Korea, I am reminded of how Canadians have a distinct accent, and how almost every Canadian says, “aboot”, to some varying degree, whether they like it or not. My recent trip back to Canada supported this. While I thought BC was immune to Ontario’s influence, I was acutely way of the ‘aboot’ I heard ad nauseam on the radio. I also came to realize that the whole Bob and Doug McKenzie’s schtick was very true to form.
From a linguistic perspective, I can understand language change, particularly vowel shifts. The big one that is occurring right now in the US is the Northern Cities Vowel shift. Just listen to Hilary Clinton and you will get a sense for it. My friends from Wisconsin say, “WiscAHnsin”; I find myself emulating them. However when I talk to somebody about Ontario, I still say “Ontario”. My brother does the same when talking about Nooova Scoootia, or buying a “care at the market.” His navy days have deeply influenced his accent, but now, as he is further removed from Bluenosers, he really only talks like them when he is talking about them. To wit, just think of the Edge from U2; he is Welsh, don’t you know…

Next time you mingle with your friends, think about how you are interacting. Who is imitating whom? Chances are, you are all trying to sound like each other, on some level. That's where language change starts: where we try to find commonality by trying to fit in.