etnobofin

Former All Black Byron Kelleher has found a new home in Toulouse, and after three years here, he’s become one of the key players for Stade Toulousain, and a crowd favourite. He’s also learnt to speak French…

As another anglophone in France who still struggles sometimes with the language, I don’t want to seem like I’m mocking him: learning a new language as an adult is not easy. But Byron’s mixture of Otago English and the accent de Toulouse is, er, original…

He says he wants to stay in France after he retires from the game, and I wish him very well – there are much worse places in the world to settle down than the southwest of France.

When I planned my move to France, I partially imagined that I’d have French friends, and that we’d speak in French all the time: erudite conversations about new-wave cinema in late-night cafés and jokes about Sarkozy amidst Gauloise smoke. The reality so far has actually been more interesting, and introduced the dilemmas of being a “foreigner” in a strange land.

Thursday night tango at Place Saint-Anne, Montpellier

So far, all my friends in France speak English. Which is not to say we all speak English together often. But it is something we all have in common. My friends fall into three broad categories:

• British and American expats (they are unavoidable, and the ones I’ve met aren’t annoying)
• French citizens who are bilingual from birth (ie. they had an anglophone parent)
• French citizens who learnt English as a second language and may have spent time in anglophone countries

Conversations with all these people often take place in French, but sometimes we switch between English and French mid-stream, depending on the subject matter and whether we think one or the other language can express an idea (or tell a joke) better.

Context plays a role: for instance, it’s ridiculous to speak to my American or British friends in French, but if a francophone friend walks into the room, we’ll switch to French so we don’t seem like we’re rudely talking in a foreign language behind their back.

Abandoned shopfront, Montpellier

I’m coming to the conclusion that my relationships in this country will always pivot around the unavoidable fact that I am a foreigner, and an anglo-saxon to boot. Perhaps this is why my friends here all speak English – at some level they all relate to the challenge of sitting inside and outside a culture at the same time.

The nature of being a foreigner does not make friendships less genuine or more distant here. It’s just a question of becoming comfortable with your role as an intermediary between two languages and cultures. Given my accent and life experience, it’s impossible to be accepted as a French person, so it’s not worth trying. But in the end, I didn’t move to France to become French.

Maybe life in France is a bit like finding oneself in an ocean – swimming in French but breathing in English. Both languages are necessary to make progress and to stay afloat.

The mouth of the Hérault river at Grau d’Agde

Is it really a small world after all?

Sometimes it feels like I’ve been living forever on a little island at the bottom of the world. Moving to Birmingham means diving headfirst into one of the most multicultural cities in the UK – the experience is confirmed in extremis by visiting the Sunday open market at the Bullring… it’s hard to believe that you are just 25 miles from Shakespeare’s birthplace when sights and smells take you straight to Baghdad, Lagos and Karachi.

Oxford was a very international city for its size, but its multiculturalism seems fairly well defined within the generally tolerant context of its educational/academic (and – let’s face it – middle class) heritage. In post-industrial Birmingham, cultures engage at all levels of city and economic life, and particularly in commerce, red in tooth and claw.

But I’m back at university. In a course that attracts students from around the world, the fascinating realities of working across cultures are making themselves apparent. In my class, there are 31 nationalities, and 95% of the students are non-native English speakers, meaning that they’re taking a masters degree taught entirely in their second/third/fourth language. (Even I’M freaked out by some of the textbook material and English is my mother tongue.)

Scary.

If UN population projections are to be believed, my class is a microcosm of what the world will look like in 2050. Working bi-culturally is something I’m fairly familiar with, but it’s a privilege to have an opportunity to work in a deeply multi-cultural environment for a change.

How does a team of Nigerians, Japanese, Colombians and a New Zealander work together to solve a given problem? It’s not clear any of us know the answer yet.

With such a diverse bunch of classmates, it’s amazing how quickly you starat to question aspects of your own culture and language that you thought were “normal” become points for discussion. For example, I had to explain the British practice of “round-buying” at the pub. In other cultures, everyone buys their own drinks.

During small group discussion exercises in class, we have to first check that everyone in the group actually fully understands the question, and clarify some of the more obscure English words: among them “Quaint”, “twine” and “sans serif”.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that, for the most part, we all get along pretty well, and that the barriers that separate us are more perceived than real. Despite our obvious differences, perhaps what we’re going to learn this year is how similar we all are.

Lewis Taylor – New Morning
From The Lost Album [Buy] [emusic]

This weekend marks two years since I arrived in Oxford. So this morning I went out and took a photo of the chapel at Merton College, as I did in April 2006 and April 2007. The unexpected snowfall overnight offered an unusual mantle of peace to the city.

24 months is by far the longest I’ve been away from New Zealand. Europe still suits me as a space for making mistakes, adventure, working and exploring. A permanent move back ‘home’ still seems to sit out somewhere in the middle-to-long-distance.

I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learnt in two years as an “expatriate”. Given how clueless I still am about most things, it’s good to recognise that certain life-truths have become apparent, or at least been reinforced.

1. You’ll never lose your kiwi accent. Somehow I had this crazy notion I’d end up talking like a Thames Valley native. It hasn’t happened yet. Despite living among English people and being bombarded by Radio 4, I still speak Noo Zild, albeit inflected by a few dialect-isms (I catch myself saying “lorry” instead of “truck”; “yawright?” in place of “how are you?” and “hiya” rather than “hi”).

2. I will never understand the English or be one of them. Despite ancestry and a British passport, there are some things about English culture I just can’t track. Social class pervades everything you do here, and much casual conversation seems to be about categorising where you fit on the ladder. This may be why the English talk about the weather so much, because meteorology is class-neutral.

And the English are so reserved in their dealings with acquaintances – kiwis, even at their most diplomatic, come across as being blunt, over-eager and slightly clumsy. Making friends with English people is HARD (or maybe I’m just a nasty person who nobody wants to know).

3. Ale served at room temperature is, in fact, a drink. It took 18 months, but English beer finally makes sense. So it’s my round next time any of you are up in Oxvegas.

Happy New Year everyone… as promised last time, here is a short glossary of words and phrases I’ve learned in Oxford. They are really only useful in this particular town, but I thought it was worth compiling them for amusement.

I’ve only included terms that I’ve actually heard people use, or used myself. A few of them are arcane university-isms, and some apply generally to the life and geography of the place.

Bod (the) The Bodleian Library, which by law contains a copy of every book published in the UK. You can’t take books out of the library, but a “Bod Card” gives university members the right to sit in the reading rooms and read the books.

Bop A party, normally held at one of the colleges. Normally organised, (although bops can become disorganised as the evening progresses). The Cambridge equivalent is an ent (as in “entertainment”).

Commons Meals, eaten in college. Of varying quality, depending on the dining hall

Down Evidence of the town’s geocentrism. Anywhere that is out of Oxford, anything that is not in Oxford, or quite simply any direction away from Oxford is “down”. The train to London is called the “down-train”. When students leave at the end of term, they don’t “go home”, rather they “go down”. If you have the misfortune to be expelled, you’re “sent down”.

Fast Train Any train to Paddington that stops at Reading and Slough only. Full of commuters and overpriced. See “Stopping Service“

House The nickname for Christ Church. There are all sorts of rules for college nicknames. University College is always called “Univ”, Brasenose is “BNC”, Magdalen is pronounced “maudlin”. And while you can call Queen’s, Wadham or Merton simply by their first name, you never say just “New” for New College, but always refer to it using both words.

Isis The big river that flows through town by Folly Bridge, where rowing and psychopathic swans happen. On most maps it’s called the Thames. But as it runs through Oxford between Godstow and Iffley (or between the Trout Inn and the Isis Tavern if you navigate via pubs), the river is often called “The Isis”, probably derived from the Latin and Celtic name Tamesis.

Keeping Term As part of the requirements to fulfil their degree, students must spend a stipulated number of nights per year within 5 miles of Carfax tower, at the centre of Oxford. Whether you do any work during this period is rather irrelevant. This is called “keeping term”.

Park End As in “Let’s go down Park End”. Forget architecture, libraries and museums. Park End Street is truly the best place in Oxford to experience English culture. Notable for teetering pedestrians, and the accumulation of kebab wrappers, broken glass and partially-digested kebab contents on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Stopping Service Any train to Paddington that stops at every village, farm gate and letterbox between Oxford and London. The journey takes about 3.5 days and you are advised to take your own provisions and sleeping bag. Full of commuters and overpriced.

Sub-fusc Formal dress worn by students when sitting exams and for other special occasions including formal halls and matriculation. Lost items of sub-fusc are occasionally found in Park End Street gutters (see “Park End“, above).

Sunken Cathedral The other name for the Martyr’s Memorial in St Giles, which resembles the spire of a cathedral buried underground. The monument commemorates the protestant martyrs who were burnt at the stake in Broad Street in 1555 and 1556. Most of the waggish tour guides will tell you that Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer weren’t killed because they were protestant, but rather because all three were Cambridge graduates.

The As in street. Certain streets in the centre of town are so important that they lose their appelation of “streets”, but gain an honorific definite article. Thus “High Street” is known as “The High”, Broad Street as “The Broad”, and the alley connecting them is “The Turl“.

Up In, or towards Oxford. This is entirely logical, because Oxford is elevated above all other places, despite being built in a swamp. (See also “Down”, above). Students “go up” at the beginning of every term, and trains from Paddington to Oxford are “up-trains”.

English is a most versatile and precocious beast, existing in many hundreds of species around the world, interbreeding and adapting to local conditions. If English is not yet quite ubiquitous, it’s omniverous. The locust of languages.

Oxford has a Dictionary and a punctuation mark named after it, and it’s also home to the oldest English-speaking university in the world. Thousands of foreign students come to town each year to learn English as a second language at one of the many private schools in the city that peddle 4-week intensive courses and TOEFL exams.

So it might be expected that some kind of perfect English is heard on Oxford streets, or at least in the tutorial rooms.

But Oxfordlish – as it’s spoken by locals – is rich and varied, whether by accident or design. In New College chapel, there’s a memorial to Thomas Spooner, for whose stumbling speech the word “spoonerism” was coined. And down the road at Magdalen, Tolkein even invented his own language – Elvish.

Oxford, a city of just 100,000 people, is such a melting pot for language that even my kiwi inflections go largely unremarked. (Sweet, bro.)

First of all, there’s no “Oxford accent”. There are several.

In suburban Headington and Cowley, the Estuary accent dominates… you could be in any medium-sized city in southeast England, with it’s broad agglomeration of home counties vowels and Cockney dropped consonants, punctuated among the young by the Essexy “Know wa’ I mean, ya?”.

Beyond the ring road lie Abingdon, Witney and the dozens of villages that make up the greater conurbation of Oxford. It’s here that you’ll hear evidence of the Cotswolds, a mere 15 miles distant, and the West Country an easy return day trip by car. The r’s start to gently burr, the i’s drift towards “oi”.

And in the city centre itself, some undergraduates wear their particular dialect like tribal marker. The undergrad accent is unmistakable – long, drawly open aah’s and a slightly superior precision of delivery, perfect for making echoes in the fog on Christ Church meadow as you jog down to the Isis for winter rowing practice.

It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re from Liverpool, Guilford or Rawalpindi – undergrads pick up their annointed accent within weeks of arrival. If you can’t tell an undergrad by the careful way she counts her remaining coins as she pays for a Sunday sandwich in Morton’s, then you can definitely tell when she opens her mouth to speak.

But, like all youthful affectations, the shimmering of undergrad English fades rapidly. With a first degree under your belt, if you stay in Oxford, you can resume the accent of your origins. No postgrad, doctoral student or Fellow I’ve heard ever sounds like they were born here. You’ll detect in their voices all the marks of home – whether that’s Manchester, Sydney, South Carolina or Copenhagen. And so the melting pot boils onwards.

Next time… a shorter Oxford glossary.