Or, Gretchenspeak.
I've created a new language all my own. In the semester of Arabic I took at Northeastern before coming to Morocco, we all amused our teacher with the random sputterings of foreign languages that we'd toss out into conversation, in our desperate attempts to not speak English. These interjections were usually in the languages we'd studied in high school- Spanish, in my case, often French, a little bit of German, etc. We laughed, our teacher was in turn bemused and frustrated, and we moved on.
For some reason, I wasn't expecting this non-English-language-mixup to continue.
I realized it was going to stay with me when I started speaking Spanish with one of the security guards in the program's academic building and said و as opposed to y (both meaning and). Forgetting the phrase for "bless you" in Arabic, I started using salu- bless you in Italian. Forgetting "excuse me," I started using pardon... which sorta works in French? Then I spoke to a Swiss couple at the Toubkal Refuge who echoed my sentiments- they both spoke 4 languages at varying degrees of fluency, and ensured me that their brains, outside of their native tongues, were blended messes of language.
I spent the past long weekend in one of my friends' grandparent's apartments in Madrid with a group of girls from the program. It was an incredible weekend; we all had so much fun and ate so much bacon. I also spent the entire weekend inserting the odd Arabic word or phrase into my Spanish.
I guess I've come full circle.
I've created a new language all my own. In the semester of Arabic I took at Northeastern before coming to Morocco, we all amused our teacher with the random sputterings of foreign languages that we'd toss out into conversation, in our desperate attempts to not speak English. These interjections were usually in the languages we'd studied in high school- Spanish, in my case, often French, a little bit of German, etc. We laughed, our teacher was in turn bemused and frustrated, and we moved on.
For some reason, I wasn't expecting this non-English-language-mixup to continue.
I realized it was going to stay with me when I started speaking Spanish with one of the security guards in the program's academic building and said و as opposed to y (both meaning and). Forgetting the phrase for "bless you" in Arabic, I started using salu- bless you in Italian. Forgetting "excuse me," I started using pardon... which sorta works in French? Then I spoke to a Swiss couple at the Toubkal Refuge who echoed my sentiments- they both spoke 4 languages at varying degrees of fluency, and ensured me that their brains, outside of their native tongues, were blended messes of language.
I spent the past long weekend in one of my friends' grandparent's apartments in Madrid with a group of girls from the program. It was an incredible weekend; we all had so much fun and ate so much bacon. I also spent the entire weekend inserting the odd Arabic word or phrase into my Spanish.
I guess I've come full circle.
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