Falling Back, 60 & 61. Different Accents, Same Language.

After about a week or so of daily writing, I've stumbled against another day bereft of energy or ideas. So, yesterday I took a sabbatical. And I heard some English.

I have always loved murder mysteries every since I started to read, I think. I don't know why, exactly, since every book is a mystery unless you've already read it. That love extends to shows on television. Detective shows tend to catch my eye, unless they are really badly conceived and badly written. And now, real life murder mysteries have caught me. Late at night, after everyone has gone to bed, I watch a British show that tells of real-life tragedies. But I watch it more for its Englishness than for the actual stories, which one can find in just about any newspaper. I like to see the different towns, and listen to the different accents. I was a francophile as a small child, and when I got my hands on English literature, I became an anglophile. I've already visited France; someday it will be Britain's turn.

Last night it was about an event in Merseyside, which, for those who don't know England, is the area around Liverpool. For many of a certain age, that will bring up memories of the Beatles. Well, the Beatles had perfect diction compared to the people I heard last night. The English spoken in the area around Liverpool, Scouse, grew from the mingling of Scottish, Irish, English, and foreigners who converged on Liverpool to work in the past couple of centuries. It is so distinctive and different from the typical accent one associates with the British Isles, that I was tempted to turn on the Spanish subtitles to find out what they were saying. After concentrating closely, and turning over words in my head, I finally figured out most of the speech, but it was almost as if I were hearing a foreign language with similarities to English. 

Another British accent that defies comprehension, is Geordie, spoken around Newcastle. When our public Spanish television network sometimes deigns to show us European television shows, one of them is sometimes Vera, about a woman police detective, set in Newcastle, in Northumbria. I will say that the producers most likely tell the actors to use Geordie in a way that everyone, everywhere in the kingdom, will understand. Yet, I am sometimes forced to read the Spanish subtitles that we have set up for my husband's benefit. Again, an influx of people from other countries and areas of Britain and Ireland, have influenced what was already a slightly different variant of speech. So much so, that in an episode of Castle, where a murderer is lurking among the students of an English as a Foreign Language class in New York City, one of the foreign students who needs an interpreter is a Geordie from Newcastle. (It also says something about how different the Geordie speech is, that in the American show they would place the Geordie in a classroom to learn English.)

Such differences don't really exist in American English (Okay, sometimes New Englanders, especially Bostonians and Mainers, can't be understood, but only with certain words.). We tend to recognize what area of the country a person hails from, but we understand each other's speech just about completely. Even Spanish, with people in the south who speak in a sing-song that is utterly foreign to a northerner, is pretty much homogeneous. And, unless someone from Uruguay or Argentina has a very closed accent, Latin American Spanish and European Spanish are pretty much understandable. The only difference in Spanish is vocabulary, with some localized uses of words that might not be understood elsewhere. For example, güagüa, which is used in the Caribbean and the Canary Islands, but mainlanders of the Peninsula scratch their heads at it. Our preferred word is autobús. Of course, I'm speaking of Castilian Spanish. Put a Galego with a Catalán, each speaking their own Spanish language, and, unless one of them is keen at languages, it's as if a Russian and Bulgarian were speaking to each other. Both Slavic languages, but with few similarities.

Sometimes, a shared language helps to separate, rather than unite.

Life continues.