FROM MY LIFE

Three languages… a Babylonian confusion?

From Afrikaans to Dutch to English… and all in one sentence!

When I read Curious Fact — There Are 6,900 Languages! by Sharing Randomly, the first thing that sprang to mind is that I am fluent in three languages — Dutch, English and Afrikaans — but then again, I’m not. Or so I sometimes think, not giving myself enough credit.

It also reminded me of an American man I knew…

The American

He was a man who commented on images I shared on an erotic website. Before long, George and I started sending each other emails, and got to know each other better. What I didn’t know (but found out in the most unpleasant way a year or two later) was he was very much in love with me, and after my divorce had decided I was ‘his’.

To me, he was just a friend, who I eventually started an online business, selling pheromones. We only did this for about a year, as after the unpleasantness, I wanted out. But this memory is not about that.

We exchanged two or three emails every week, talking about our families, friends, our work, and eventually our business together. Now George is the one who taught me to answer emails between each other’s lines, in a different color. That way, you knew exactly what the other responded to. What I then did was to jump from paragraph to paragraph, only reading his responses, as I pretty much remembered what I had written only a day or two before.

One day, I received an email from him in which he was clearly upset with me. His harsh language literally chilled my blood and I went back to what I had written. I seriously had to read his response and my words several times before I realized he had totally misinterpreted what I had written. I wish I can remember the specific example. Something had gotten ‘lost in translation’.

Even though I had English lessons from a fairly young age, it was never (and still isn’t) my first language. In my letter, I had written something, meant one way, and he read it in a totally different one, causing a misunderstanding. I explained to him how I had meant it, and he came back with apologies because he had indeed read a different meaning into my words.

Had I been standing across from him and said the same words, he wouldn’t have reacted angrily, because my body language and tone of voice would evidently have shown him what I had said was actually quite innocent.

Afrikaans

This is the language I primarily grew up with. We spoke mainly Afrikaans at home, and occasionally English when my mom wanted my brother and me to practice. I went to an Afrikaans school, but from about the third year in primary school, English was a compulsory subject. I had to pass both Afrikaans and English exams or fail the entire year.

I’m not fluent in speaking Afrikaans anymore. It’s been 27 years since I spoke it daily, and even though it’s the language I grew up with, I don’t feel comfortable in speaking it. Reading, writing and listening are not a problem. However, I know if I ever go back to South Africa and am there for longer than a week, I will easily pick up and be able to speak it fluently again, except maybe for some new words that were adopted into the language in the past 27 years.

English

As said, English was part of my education from quite a young age, and by the time I started working, it was also a language I had to use with customers, as there are as many primarily English-speaking people in South Africa as Afrikaans-speaking. I never had a problem with speaking English, even though I knew I wasn’t perfect at it, and I feel I’m still not.

I hear my own mistakes when I speak it, maybe because I concentrate on that too much. Sometimes I just let them go, other times I stumble over my own words trying to correct myself. Part of the mistakes I make is because my mind is still in ‘Dutch mode’ while my mouth tries to form English words. Mostly when I change my thinking to English, my speaking seems to improve too.

When I write, I prefer to write in English, as this definitely is the language I feel the most comfortable in, and this was the primary consideration when I started my blog. That, and because only a fraction of people on the globe speaks Dutch and Afrikaans.

Dutch

I come from a Dutch-born mom and a South African father, which means I heard Dutch as a child (when we visited my grandparents and some of my aunts/uncles). However, we never learned to speak it.

When I came to the Netherlands at the end of 1994, it took me years to learn to speak Dutch. The main reason for this is that Afrikaans come from Dutch. Afrikaans grammar is much simpler than Dutch grammar. In Dutch, you have verb conjugations with the different tenses, while in Afrikaans all verbs are exactly the same in the present tense, no matter the number of people involved, and it also has exactly the same conjugation for all verbs in the past tense or even the past perfect tense.

Now, having lived here for 27 years, I have almost lost my Afrikaans accent, and many people don’t even realize I’m not Dutch-born when they hear me speak. Conversations are easy enough, except that, just like with English, I hear my own mistakes. Not only with those verb conjugations but also with the article (‘the’ and ‘a’ in English) of which Dutch has three.

Our family language

One day, I went to Amsterdam with a cousin of mine. She grew up speaking Dutch and English at home and went to an English school.

We were constantly talking, catching up after years of not seeing each other. We entered a shop, talking. We looked around, picking up items and putting them down, sometimes talking, sometimes not. A shop attendant approached us and asked — in English — if he could help us.

We answered him in Dutch.

He remarked ‘oh, you can speak Dutch’ to which my cousin and I looked at each other and back at him, questions in our eyes.

“Oh,” he said, “you spoke English when you entered the shop.”

My cousin and I looked at each other and said: “Did we?”

That’s the way it is in our family when we are together because all of us had similar youths. None of us really notice which language we speak. Our parents were born in the Netherlands (except for my father and one other uncle), moved to South Africa and all of them moved back here. When we are together, we speak three languages in one sentence!

We understand each other, but to those listening around us, it can be a Babylonian confusion!

I grew up in South Africa, but for four years we lived in Namibia, and in years we didn’t live there, our vacations took us there. That’s why I thoroughly enjoyed a photo post by Anne Bonfert where I recognized many scenes from Namibia:

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