An autobiographical piece

A native speaker of any language usually has a cultural homeland: a place where he or she associates the deepest and fondest memories of childhood and rhyme.

Such a place exists for me, though it is now just a memory, for it was never mine to keep. For one, the place itself, and the notion of family life, adorned with images of mothers holding freshly baked cakes and Christmas trees and suchlike are disassociated from one another in my case due to cirumstance. This is no more regrettable than being just a fact, and it sets the stage for the curious relationship I have with my native language English, and the accent which eventually developed on account of it all.

An English accent among many. To begin with, one result of the meanderings my family undertook in my youth, is that my accent is near to untraceable. A mish-mash; going all over the place. A tramp of an accent I carry, lithe, like an eel, moving around, escaping the listener. It’s a bother at times, because people like a clear message, as in: “I am a chocolate ice-cream kind of girl”, or: “I like pink dresses, and it is really pink dresses that I like.” Well, with me, if people are at all familiar with the various nesting places of the English language on our planet, they end up confused, not knowing if their spade is a spade or perhaps one of those other tools in the shed.

Now, either we can chat and you tell me about yourself and all the while you try and figure it out, or you read what it says below, after which the cat will be out of the bag, and you’ll know where “I got mine”. Maybe you do not care, in which case just forget it, no feelings will be hurt.

Initially, we were a Dutch-speaking family, speaking the dialect of ‘Antwerps’ and living in the heart of the city of Antwerp, where I was born. When we emigrated to South Africa I was six months old, and the Dutch language did not get a foothold with me. In South Africa, I will stipulate here, it is NOT Afrikaans that is generally spoken in the streets, at least not in the cities, but English. (English is officially the dominant language of that country today, with the ten others, including Afrikaans, Zulu and Xhosa, all of equal status, following in second place.)

Cape Town is a mainly English-speaking community unless you’re out in the Flats, towards the mountains known as the ‘Hottentot Hollands’. (There they speak a gruff, highly entertaining scrawl version of Afrikaans, fabulous and exciting to listen to. As an adult I learned to appreciate the rich culture of the Afrikaans language, although I never really learned to speak it fluently.)

Well, we simply spoke English: in the streets, at school and with our mother. I had the usual sing-song South African accent, typical of that country, and was happily unaware of myself.

When we moved to Germany nine years later and I attended a posh, elitist, English language International School, in which the dominant culture was American, since most of the students came from the USA, originally. I was quite happy to be culturally colonized by the American accent at school, and had in fact already started practising “my American” the night before departure. American came as naturally to me at the age of nine as climbing a tree.

Drastically, after six years at that school I was separated from English. At age fourteen I was sent to a German government school. I was devastated. English, my first love, was getting a back seat in my education. In that period I despised the separation from English terribly. I endured it bitterly, hating every hour in which I did not speak it; I read in English, thought in English, wrote journals, short stories, poems; I collected lists of vocabulary words and swore copiously, all in English. I looked for people who spoke English, and bought English magazines, I sought out movie theatres which had the decency to use sub-titling – the lot. Of course I also spoke, wrote, and read literature, in German; I had to and did enjoy it, but my loyalty to English was unfailing, not to be toppled. Right.

Until this point I had not been exposed to proper British English, other than “Fawlty Towers” and the rest of that gang. (Their bloody marvellous humour did not escape me, not even before puberty.) But to deepen my understanding of English I needed to be an adult, and converse openly and daily in the language. When I returned to South Africa at 19 my accent was sorely a mess, but my closest friends were British, mainly born and raised in Oxford. I learned to ‘speak in the street’ all over again, to bargain and close deals, to talk shop. After that, years of travel in the company of people from England showed me that their usage was actually what I was aiming for, what I wanted, with regard to ‘my’ English. The proper English pronunciation, the beauty of the humour and wit, I consumed it all with great eagerness. Of course, I still make many, many mistakes. But I have accepted this as part of the relationship I have to the language. After all, I believe that British English is what ballet is to the rest of modern or avant-garde dance styles. Sort out your form, and with a spot of discipline, the rest will follow.

During my travels I heard many variants of English. In Australia I marvelled at the strong, boisterousness of their tone; in New Zealand a few years later, I laughed at adjectives like ‘choice’ (i.e.: “that’s a choice puppy you got there!”) and tried to wrap my tongue around the odd way those Kiwi’s pronounce ‘no’. (It’s amazing: they actually bring up the sides of the BACK of the tongue to touch the top row of molars (velar), while the tip of the tongue hangs suspended in the middle of the mouth, producing a sort of “noi” – try it, if you like.)

During many visits to India I enjoyed the melodious sound of Indian English, while my partner in conversation softly waggled his head in affirmation of the subject matter (just like our nodding). After a few weeks in California once, I gave away my non-American origin by saying “surname” instead of “last name” when someone asked me my name, thus messing up an interview – very embarrassing!

And all the while, lists of vocab, on the backs of envelopes and boarding passes, followed me from book to book. How else must you do it with a language with so many words, with so many faces????

Today, I speak English to my children, and to my husband, spoken with a hybrid of it all: South African, American, British, a spot of ol’ Australian just to tease the kids, or the “Indian salesmen” (a favourite). Although after nearly nine years in the Netherlands my Dutch is fine, we keep the English up because it is the most intimate language we share. My husband is Dutch, and speaks Dutch with our boys, but all of us are fluent and playful with English. Our sons discovered the fantastic scope of swearwords English has to offer quite early on of course, and they use them with alacrity. I try to curtail this use, but it is sorely difficult to re-introduce modesty in this respect, when you have a bunch of midgets jumping around you shouting out happily and naughtily what they have understood is their perfect right to abuse. Ah, the joys of culture and language and of growing up.

Currently I am a student all over again, hoping to complete a three/four year training to become – guess what!?! – sigh, an English teacher, of course. This is the final, daring leap I will make – into the depths of the English language I have always known were there, but were insurmountable to me without a commitment to the academic world, and only possible with the guidance of excellent teachers. Luckily, these are now a given. It is with great joy that I take on this challenge. I love English, and am excited about where this journey has yet to take me.