Although on the surface of things, as an English professor, it is my responsibility to know and maintain grammatical and mechanical correctness, which I absolutely can and faithfully do, my real love is for accented Englishes, dialects, creoles, and pidgins– including what academics now call global englishes. Accented English for me (and many others) is the language of the home, while proper, correct English is about performance, achievement–the perpetual task and mask of fitting in, pretending, succeeding—and ultimately beating the British, Canadians, or Americans at their own game. You can see that, in the end, I have done quite well at this contest, having been sanctioned by the academy and the state as official coach, player, or referee–depending on what is most needed from me at the time.
In actuality, neither of my parents had English as their first language. And I would have written in whatever language that was given to me. My father first spoke in Dutch until, as a Jewish boy, he was forced to leave Holland when he was ten to escape the Nazi invasion of Nederland. He was sent to boarding school in England and eventually, after the war, was reunited with the rest of his family in Canada. My mother is a sabra, a native Israeli, born there eleven years before it became a country. Her first language was Hebrew. My parents, like me, had first languages that were different from their parents’ first languages; my father’s parents first spoke German, my mother’s mother’s first language was Polish, and her husband’s first language was Russian. My family’s connection to any language is thus tenuous, an accident of birth, usually necessitated by a drastic and sudden immigration across the globe, the ultimate goal being survival despite pogroms and holocausts.
English, for my parents, was an intermediary language–the only way they could begin to understand each other… and perhaps they never actually did. Neither spoke the language perfectly although my father had the advantage having lived in an English speaking country from the age of ten, while my mother did not move to the United States until she was twenty-seven.
I was the first in the family to speak English as my native language–my mother likes to say she smuggled me into the country–as she was three months pregnant with me when she and my father moved from Tel Aviv to New York City. Their mistakes, hesitations, and accents in speaking English represented home to me, and to this day their mistakes are my own. I still hesitate before saying “place mats” as my mother used to call them “place mates” which, when you think about it, is more charming and makes just as much sense. My father spoke English with what I discovered, quite late in life, was a Canadian accent. Is it an accident then that I married a man, born and raised in British Columbia, who pronounces the word “sorry” (a powerful word for any man to use with a woman who is in love) the way my father did?
Who knows, but the way people acquire English (or any language really) continues to fascinate me, not just intellectually. To hear another language’s rhythms, vowels, emphases, vocabulary or word order in English makes me feel comfortable, warmly surprised, and happy. Perhaps not what most of my students expect of their college English teacher, but there it is.
So lately I have been collecting, for my own amusement, tweets written in English by Dutch people I don’t know—the tweets are there for public consumption and thus for anyone’s entertainment, I assume—and they are charming and fascinating to me because I can hear the Dutch in them.
To even the score, as well as to demonstrate my pleasure in collecting these tweets is not malicious in any way, I’ll give examples of the same phenomenon from my own teenage diary. I lived in Holland from ages eleven to sixteen, attended a Dutch school, and by the time I left was fluent to such an extent that many of classmates never knew I was American (which had been my goal from the moment I had arrived). Although I began my diary in English and faithfully wrote in that language until we, quite suddenly from my teenage perspective, returned to the US, in my later entries one can hear that accented English—the Dutch in the phrasing and order and choice of my words. Dutch words and phrases are sprinkled in, and, most tellingly perhaps, the poem I wrote about having to leave Holland and my friends (including my first boyfriend) behind was written in Dutch.
Here then are a few examples:
“Thursday was the eindfeest, which was a lot of fun (no boys(3)) [I had codes for many of my friends and boyfriends so that my brother who occasionally read my diary wouldn’t be able to follow precisely what was going on] but it still turned out to be gezellig…. Drank a lot of beer—overdid it so much that Mom locked up what was left of it in the closet! We (5, 2 and Suz) didn’t sleep the whole night, and went biking around in our nightgowns at 3:30 in the morning!”
Here’s a particularly Dutch-sounding phrase:
I like that type of people, P, J, H, all those…”
and this one:
“which reminds me, of A and V I chose V (though a few days before I had been verliefd op A) and it’s sure to have been a good choice—we’ve got something going for a month now! Congratulations if you please.”
Here’s one in which I just give up and codeswitch, there being no English equivalent for what I wanted to say:
“I’m going to wear what I want on Saturday (dan vindt ’ie ’t maar kak)”
Ok, it goes on like that, in typical teenage girl diary fashion, but when I read the tweets of those “Dutchies,” some of that distant, captivating, far away time and country comes back to me, and so for this simple yet exquisite pleasure I thank them, whoever they may be.
- Daphne Desser
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