Language Lessons

Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least the perception of it. A shared language says “We’re the same.” A language barrier says “We’re different.

Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

If I were a better linguist, I could write volumes on the languages of the Iberian Peninsula. Not to mention the fine line between language and dialect (which is usually more politics than linguistics). Most of the languages there are separate evolutions of vulgar Latin, and not descended from each other. The relevant part of all that though, is that no culture wants to be considered a mere variation. 

Spontaneously applying for a program in Portugal, after planning for a program in Mexico, created some hiccups. I was most concerned about language. I never wanted to be an Ugly American. How embarrassing to be that tourist shouting increasingly loud English at people who neither speak nor understand the language, as if fluency can be altered by aggression.

My fantasies of being a world traveler never included being on a tour bus from one gift shop to another. I want to go to new places and connect with new people. I want to learn new things and become a new person. It stands to reason that I would be an outsider, but I wanted to at least be a courteous outsider. 

I dove deep into Duolingo Portuguese. This is good for practicing unconnected words, but not necessarily for composing my own sentences. It definitely wasn’t enough for understanding the why of a new language. I also binged the Netflix series 3%. Familiarizing myself with a Brazilian accent was not as helpful in Portugal as I’d hoped. It was a good show though. This is all to say, I showed up in Portugal with absolutely no command of the language. 

Portuguese sounded like what would happen if a French person tried to speak Spanish with an Italian accent. The phonetics, the sounds of the language, are very French to my untrained ears. The morphology and syntax, word construction and grammar, are very close to Spanish. I could read with almost the same comprehension level I have in Spanish. There are a lot of cognates, and overlapping words, between the two languages. The prosody, the language’s rhythm, has the expressive rising and falling that I associate with Italian. I found it both beautiful and unintelligible when I first arrived. 

My brain seems to have two language buckets. One of them is for English, my native, and only fluent, tongue. The other is for Not English, which is mostly Spanish. Despite being around it my entire life, I speak Spanish horribly. Yet my brain still thinks it knows the language when I’m listening to it. I mean, it does, but only up until the point where it doesn’t. 

Despite proximity, more Portuguese people are fluent in English than in Spanish. Unfortunately, my Not English brain bucket pulls up Spanish first. If I was struggling to communicate in Portuguese (which if it was anything more complicated that placing a food order, I struggled), I tended to fall back on asking myself, ¿Cómo se dice? Most often this Spanish phrase led to nothing, because I was muttering to non-Spanish speakers. Occasionally, it led to fluent Castilian Spanish, in a Portuguese accent, pouring towards my Spanglish seasoned Californian ears. It turns out that I never understand Spanish under those circumstances. Most Portuguese people were able to speak to me in English, but I frequently triggered the wrong language bucket in their brains. 

I wanted to distance myself from the American tourist stereotype of demanding that everyone else accommodate my monolingual self. It’s just that English really has become the most accessible lingua franca. While dancing I met a lovely French woman. Things were loud and there was some alcohol involved, such that I can’t remember the exact conversation now. Neither of us was fluent in Portuguese, the language we started in. She made a bid for conversing in French, but I cannot. I offered Spanish as an alternative. She could not. But it turned out we were both fluent in English. 

My ability to thrive, to immediately acclimate, in a non-English speaking environment was greatly exaggerated in my daydreams of travel. My efforts seemed to be regarded as charming but useless in most interactions. Many Europeans are better at speaking English than I am at speaking not-English. My attempts to submerge myself in a non-English speaking environment were repeatedly thwarted. I tried, though. I tried to the point of exasperation for myself and those around me. 

“Thank you” was a weirdly challenging word. I asked someone how to say thank you and they told me to say, “obrigada.” But then the guy at the farmer’s market would always say “obrigado.” So I switched to saying that instead, but then I felt like people were correcting me to say obrigada, but then others were saying obrigado. It was baffling.

Eventually, it was explained to my very confused self, that it’s more equivalent to saying “much obliged” than “thank you.” Obliged is an adjective. In Portuguese (and Spanish) adjectives have this whole gender agreement thing going on. So if I, a female presenting person am expressing gratitude that is obrigada, but if a male person is doing so that is obrigado. It only took me a few weeks to get that sorted out.

There was a place around the corner from my Lisbon apartment where I would frequently drop €3 on a pastry and coffee drink, um pastel de nata e um galão… One morning, feeling particularly in need of caffeine, I could not for the life of me remember how to say “please” in Portuguese. My brain kept pulling up the Spanish por favor. I was growing increasingly frustrated and flustered at my inability to find the Portuguese and eventually settled on just saying it in English so the poor food server could go about her day. Later, after the caffeine had seeped in, much too late to use it, I remembered how to say please in Portuguese. Por favor. It’s por favor, the exact same as in Spanish. 

It was the patience and determination of one lunch lady that got me to where I could order in complete sentences. I started out with just sort of a point and hope for the best method of ordering. Eventually, I was brave enough to say the brand of the water I wanted. The lunch lady talked to me like I was a toddler in the most helpful of ways. She would repeat things back to me how I should have said them, kindly, increasing my vocabulary one order at a time.

Then she got stubborn, adding words to my order, and refusing to give it to me unless I at least tried the new word(s). So it evolved as such- Pedras, por favor > água Pedras, por favor > garrafa de água Pedras, por favor > uma garrafa de água Pedras, por favor. I love that lunch lady and hope she’s living a great life wherever she is now. 

The other person who was incredibly helpful to me was our professor’s academic assistant. Unlike the lunch lady, the assistant spoke English and I could ask her all of my dumb questions about how and why Portuguese does the things it does. And like the lunch lady, she increased difficulty level over time. In Lisbon, I lived very close to the Campo Pequeno Metro station. First I had to learn to say pequeno instead of pequeño, because not Spanish. But then the academic assistant pointed out one of those sound differences I wasn’t even hearing. I aspirate my word initial Ps. 

Hold your palm flat, about an inch in front of your mouth and say “reach,” nothing will happen. If you say, “peach,” though, you’ll feel a short blast of breath against your palm right after the P. If you say it in Portuguese, pêssego, you should not feel the puff of air, the aspiration, after the P. I find it incredibly difficult to not have that puff. I also struggle with the Portuguese R which is in an entirely different part of the mouth than my Spanish or English R.

My neighborhoods were such that I felt safe walking alone at relatively deserted times of day. This led to my frequently wandering the streets of Portugal muttering to myself, pêssego, pêssego, pêssego, carro, carro, carro. Fortunately, despite the country’s excellent mental health services, I was never committed for this behavior. I did however get the occasional odd look when I would suddenly find myself less alone than expected. 

In Mexico, I am regarded as pocha, at best, because Mexican-Americans, especially those who speak broken, awkward Spanish, are definitely not Mexican. In Mexico, we are othered as American and in the states we are othered as Mexican (even Latinos who are Puerto Rican, Guatemalan, etc., are often othered as “Mexican,” as if my father’s nationality were a slur). Often, I have felt welcome, but not necessarily included, when I am in Mexico. I think speaking better Spanish would help, but not entirely. 

I have a tiny bit of Portuguese DNA on my Mexican side, but no connection to that cultural heritage. Still, while in Portugal, I felt fully embraced, and supported by my temporary community. I was able to learn a surprising amount of Portuguese in my short time there. This was in no small part due to generous women who were willing to guide me. 

It made me think about my tía who immigrated to California in her early teens as a migrant farm worker. She is very proud of having taught herself to read and write in English, despite never attending school here. My grandfather on that side was a bracero and eventually ended up bringing his wife and his children to work as well. Based on the stories my tía has told me, they were needed, but not necessarily welcome. Her own first husband, an American of Mexican descent, called her a “wetback” when they’d fight. The English-speaking community in California was not nearly as friendly or helpful to her as the Portuguese-speaking community was to me. 

The Irish side of my family already spoke English before they came to America, even though that was not their ancestors’ language. The Mexican side of my family spoke Spanish, and doesn’t even know what indigenous language(s) we lost. Both of my cultures speak the language of their colonizer. And those are the languages I use when in those countries.

My tía is quick to point out that her English is not perfect, but she’s not afraid to use it. Ultimately, that’s the crux of it. If you want to learn a language, use it. If you want to keep a language, use it. Use it, or lose it. The only thing more surprising than how quickly I was learning Portuguese was how much more quickly I lost it when I got home. Knowing a language requires a community of people willing to use it with you. 

Somebody said you stole my language
Some people will say anything

Somebody say you robbed my heritage

Some people will believe anything

Somebody said you always spoke English

Somebody got the wrong impression

Tonic
Celtic Aggression