Tongues of Confusion

[steepholm]

"He sometimes works in the pet shop next door," I said to my Japanese teacher, referring to the man who had approached us in the cafe where we were sitting to say hello. "We got to know each other a bit because we came to the same cafe quite often."

"It's a good job you said that in Japanese," she replied (because I had). "What if he overheard you?"

I don't think he would have cared, frankly - his work as a part-time pet shop assistant is hardly a secret - but it got us talking about the way lesser-known languages are sometimes used as a secret code. My teacher's daughter, for example, has been known to make personal remarks about the appearance of people in the street, safe in the knowledge that she won't be "overheard" because she's making them in Japanese.

I can certainly see the appeal of using a language this way, but it's not something an English monoglot can ever do, given how widely English is understood. Even in Japanese it's a risk: who knows whether the person whose big behind you've just dissed may not also be studying for her JLPT1? Even if you're prepared to take the risk with Japanese, what about, say, German or Italian? How obscure would a language have to be for you to be publicly catty in it?

My friend Miho once told me how she and her husband were on a train in central Europe, going to a language conference. The only other person in the compartment was a European man, travelling alone. She and Hiroshi chatted in Japanese, naturally; but when they came to their destination, their companion surprised and (more interestingly) shocked them by making a polite remark in perfect Japanese as they disembarked.

What interests me about the story isn't that Miho was a little retrospectively embarrassed at being understood (though, knowing her, I don't suppose she had been poking fun at their companion), but that she felt quite strongly that the man should have made it clear that he could understand them much earlier. Apparently he felt it too, because later at the conference (where it turned out he too was a delegate) he found her and apologised for not speaking sooner.

To be honest, I find that quite hard to get my head round - but then, it would never occur to me to assume that no one could understand my native tongue.

Comments

[cmcmck]

We have been known to speak French to one another in certain situations- as you say, it has a certain appeal.

[steepholm]

Though I'm not sure it speaks to one's finer instincts...

[redbird]

I'm from New York City, where people speak a lot of languages, and/bu it's never safe to assume that your obscure (native) language is so obscure that nobody else in the subway car speaks it, even if they don't "look like" they do. Once in a while I'd see anecdotes like "they were chatting in $uncommon_language, which is the native tongue of the woman my parents hired as a nanny when I was a baby." People being people, a lot of those are of the forms "On the way off the bus, I told them in that language to stop saying rude things" or "I asked, in that language, if they needed help" (because neither "are you sure this is the right train?" nor "her clothes are ugly" involve complicated vocabulary).

I'm fluent only in English, and my helping people in their own language extends only to Spanish and once French (my limited vocabulary happened to include the answer to their question). And even in New York, people were sometimes surprised that I spoke some Spanish, though I suspect that was the intersection of my appearance, stereotypes about New Yorkers being hurried and unhelpful, and likely (alas) past experiences of other strangers demanding they learn English.

[steepholm]

Bristol isn't New York or London but it's still pretty multicultural, so I'm quite surprised that people take the risk here either. In my home town, now, you'd be on to a safer bet.

[calimac]

An incident similar to Miho's - only deliberate, where the hidden understanderer is brought to a business meeting to overhear what the other side are saying to each other - forms a major plot point in David Lodge's novel Nice Work.

[steepholm]

Oh yes, I remember that! Robin (Robyn?) and the Germans, wasn't it?

[calimac]

That was it. I've read that book 3 or 4 times; it's so rare for me to find a novelist I really like.

[steepholm]

It riffed on Gaskell’s North and South, if I recall. And there was a decent TV version starring Haydn Gwynne and Warren Clarke.

[calimac]

Lodge wrote an article about the adaptation and making of the tv version. I'd like to see it, but have never been able to find it when I looked.

[thistleingrey]

I have eavesdropped quite cheerfully on German-speaking scholars and tourists for years. Only once did I reveal myself, and it's because a small boy referred to me and then bumped into me by accident on the train. I said, "Entschuldigung," so that he'd realize I wasn't furniture.