Find Your Language
No one wants to hang out with my best friend and I anymore. And it’s not just because of the smell. Unfortunately, we speak a different language.
What this language is exactly is hard to define. It exists in that odd place where the vast oceans of Indian English, French, Dolantongue, millennialspeak and personal jokes meet. And it is not even vaguely understandable to anyone else.
For example, “Coming owat?,” means, “Are you bailing on me again or not? Just let me know so I can get on with my life.” “HOWR?,” is a misnomer; though it sounds like “How are you doing?,” it actually means, “has your work driven you to contemplate suicide yet and if so, should I come over with ice cream?” In this way, our language allows us to express love and concern without doing so directly. Call it advanced bestfriendship. Or Daisyrickish, like I do.
Eventually, to the amusement, exasperation and sheer horror of many, it began spreading. Today, college juniors who have never met either of us speak it fluently, albeit with their own twist to it. We aren’t sure whether to be proud or ashamed of ourselves.
At some point, I realized that our language not only helped give vent to our everyday millennial angst and nihilism. It also began to shape the way we thought and responded to each other. Language does this to you. It shapes who and what you are, how you think and how you experience your world. As someone who grew up at the intersection of multiple languages, I feel this keenly.
My parents were Mangalorean Catholics, both fluent in their native Konkani, living in a state where the majority language is Kannada, which they also spoke fluently. Hindi grows in importance everyday through a series of unfortunate events involving a madman, an infant, and other prominent members of Indian politics. It was a language both my parents could scrape by in. My mother learnt English through school and college; my father’s family was bilingual. The former could also speak Tulu. And then, fulfilling the wet dream of every ladder climbing middle class Indian, they moved to the U.A.E.
There, they cooed and screamed at each other almost exclusively in English. They did the same almost exclusively in Konkani with their own and each other’s parents. The former was the only thing they spoke to and around us, unless they wanted to keep something from us, which was when they’d switch to Kannada. And the string of domestic help that raised us spoke a variety and combination of these languages. Meanwhile, learning Arabic was compulsory for every child growing up in the U.A.E. I also had to study Hindi till sixth grade and French till 10th. Most of my friends were Keralites. Naturally, they delighted in teaching me their choicest swear words (some I still employ fondly while caressing a stubbed toe,) and basic grammar. Thus, I was extremely lucky to have had the opportunity to learn at least seven languages during my childhood.
When I reached Paris, I spoke only one fluently. Daisyrickish.
Bear with me for a second here. There are two kinds of people in this world. The first are those that toil day and night to earn a living while fluently speaking three, four, five languages and learning another. And then there’s me, who sits in the lap of luxury, living one of the most intercultural lives possible, going to MacDonald’s, being asked, “here or to go?”, and replying with, “Yes.”
This longterm inability to produce intelligible speech has led to a deep fascination for words, language and literature in general. Eternally tongue-tied, I am always amazed when I listen to or read a thought that rings as clear as a temple bell on a winter morning. This also gets me thinking about what phrases and idioms can teach me about a culture.
Take Ishq, a word that finds itself meaning love in Arabic, Hindi, Urdu and possibly many other languages. And then there’s Rooh, a Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic and Farsi word meaning soul. This tells even the naked eye that these languages shared roots at some point. Exploring the history of language is a task certainly worth doing if we want to better understand ourselves and how we think.
Another Arabic favourite of mine is:
Though ‘Ya’ is translated as ‘you’, it feels and means something closer to ‘Oh’, but only as a form of address to someone before you. Thus, to me it reads, “Oh, bury me”, giving it a haunting desperation; a sense of the speaker’s sheer inability to live without the listener.
Years ago, this inspired the following poem, in the voice of Nefertiti mourning Akhenaten:
They buried you
‘Neath a molten sunset,
And tiger skies
In our coldest tomb.
Your name in water glyphs
Lining its insides.
They carved our likeness,
Languishing on ice thrones
In the heat of Amarna
A scene of our children,
Another of their funerals.
My tears sizzle in the dust.
This is no city for old ghosts.
But beloved, I am
Cursed with your incessant breathing inside my ribcage
And the tears tell me
That your madness
Still haunts my reed voice.
When they come for me,
To burn our heretic love,
Know that in the fire of my pyre,
We will live forever.
- Ya’aburnee
That’s what Arabic can do. And then we have Dutch.
The Dutch language and its eccentricities were introduced to me by a friend (whom you will happily encounter- or be forced to, at any rate- in a future blogpost as part of a new series on People Who Matter To Me) who was fascinated by her own language, particularly all the farm animals referenced for no clear reason. I present some of our collective favourites below:
Je weet nooit hoe een koe en haas vangt literally translates as “you never know how a cow catches a hare,” but means, “you never know what can happen.” And this is true. After all, did you ever think you’d be reading a blogpost about cows chasing bunnies?
I’m trying hard to think of all the concise people I know and decide whether they have ever brought the house down or not. (See what I did there? Hehe.)
“Haal geen oude koeien uit de sloot,” literally translates as, “don’t pull out old cows from ditches” means “don’t bring up the past in this discussion as it’s not applicable.” I leave it to anyone’s imagination to discover adequate explanation and imagery for that one.
Now for one that makes sense culturally: when the Dutch say, “oh, you’re on that bicycle”, what they’re trying to say is, “oh, you’re on that train of thought.” While this is practically Einsteinian in comparison to their usual fair, it still begs the question: how many Dutch people ride tricycles together?
Of course, English has rewarded Dutch by tormenting it in as many ways as possible. Depending on which website you visit, a Dutch wife is a bolster for your legs in bed, a wife away from your actual wife and/or a blow-up doll. The meaning of “it all sounds like double-Dutch to me” is as clear as day. “Getting one’s Dutch up” is making someone angry. I leave you to read what Dutch oven means in your own leisure and time. “Going dutch”, the most well-known one, however, is fitting in the eyes of my friend. Splitting the bill based on individual portions consumed and not by the number of people at the table, is, according to her, in accordance with the nation’s famed stinginess.
While the Dutch were busy making idioms out of farm animals, the French were doing so with food. “Noyer le poisson”, to drown a fish, is a particularly bizarre one at first glance. Sure, there could have been smarter ways to say, “avoiding the issue.” But what indicates the French lack of tolerance for beating around the bush more than implying the pointlessness of doing so?
“Manger/sucer les pissenlits par la racine,” literally translates into “to eat / suck the dandelions by the root”, but the real meaning is to be dead. Even six feet under, the French see themselves as munching on something.
The Chinese language has recently begun fascinating me through a series of books by brilliant authors including Jung Chang and Amy Tan. My two favourites are how, when the Chinese want to say “mind your own business” but politely say, instead, “in this matter, you should not concern yourself for my sake.” I find this stunningly fitting with the national character. The second is a phrase from the Cultural Revolution, when male Party officials had to ask the government for permission to discuss marriage. This was called “tan-lian-ai” or, “talking about love.” Somehow, asking permission to “talk about love” also seems oddly fitting for the Chinese.
But nothing, not even Chinese can compare to Konkani.
English is my mother tongue, as it were but it has always felt clunky, somehow unsure of itself on my Indian tongue. My favourite ‘English’ works are translations, or works by writers who grew up nourished by other languages. And my favourite language is and always will be Konkani.
“Ami tujhe ghara thaon bair podle,” feels warm. Saying that you’ve just “fallen” out of the home of the person you’re visiting gives the sense that you never really left it the last time you were in; almost tripping across their threshold into your own home. “Tell them I’ve asked about them,” is a gently way to express concern for someone in the close circle of the listener. It gives the sense of gentle urgency; the need to impress upon the listener the importance of the concern expressed for their significant other by the speaker. “Is everything else going well?,” is the most common way to end a phone call, as if the speaker can almost not bear to end the phone call directly.
Konkani is the language of my childhood, something I heard my very eloquent mother feel most comfortable using. Having worked in numerous international companies and being a voracious reader, she conversed almost exclusively in English with us. But listening to her speak Konkani felt like watching her take off her high heels after a particularly long day. The way the language flowed off her tongue always seemed loving to me. They were the same happy bickering I heard among my grandmother and her sisters over who got to wash the dishes, or the gonging of my grandfather as he recited prayers.
One of the only people who ever made her laugh was her youngest brother. As with all the other members of her family, she spoke to him almost exclusively in Konkani. Hearing my mother, (nicknamed sourpuss by me, whose well-known moodiness I’ve inherited; thanks, cosmic irony,) laugh after listening to one of my uncle’s ridiculous jokes made me associate it with her happiness. In the end, Konkani feels naturally linked to the only place I consider home; Mangalore.
Speaking Konkani to me feels liberating but nostalgic; like coming to an old home but finding it empty. Today, I have all but lost its cadences and rhythms thanks to my hot pursuit of the language of passion. But in the process, I’ve lost my real language of love.
The fact that all these musical languages chortle happily from one chamber of my brain to the other, allowing me to think in many of them at the same time is a blessing. It has helped me develop an interest in learning many other languages like German, Chinese, Portuguese, Bengali and certainly Arabic, all of which I hope to pursue someday.
I content myself for the time being in knowing that I’ve engineered the development of an entirely new language altogether. Oddly familiar, ridiculously funny, comically exasperating, it gives my friends and I something to chuckle about even on the worst of days. And that’s worth something.
