According to my bestEST (Yes, I know that, as one of my former professors in Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh used to say, I am “murdering the English language”!) American friend, I have a habit of talking to complete strangers and telling them rather shocking things. “Without shame,” she says, “and with your accent, you get away with it!” She thinks that if she were saying similar things as an American, people would just stare at her flabbergasted. Given that I was brought up in what Freud could easily define as a “shame culture,” where what you said or did mattered because of the ripple-effects it had on your “reputation” and the gossip that filled people’s lives determined by close family ties, I have come a long way.

photo credit: Timothy Valentine

And I think I have. (Shall I put this down as part of my Americanization, nevertheless? . The fact is that I do love talking to people, and the beauty of NYC is that you meet all these people from all over the world, and they all have their life-stories to tell. What happens is that part of me talking is the sociolinguist who is used to doing research and is fascinated by history and language. It is not that I am “using” the people I talk to as my little laboratory mice to extract information from, but I do listen to what they are saying through the filter of theory. My teaching has also been shaped by a mischievous desire to shock people into awareness, so I tend to throw out ideas that students could find potentially shocking in order to get them thinking about the issues involved. (Whatever the poor instructor can do to get them off their “gadgets,” Blackberries and iphones hidden under textbook-covers.)

But I never really thought that I “get away” with things because of my accent. Of course, my American friend, the sweetest girl on earth, meant it all in the best possible way: charming person with a charming accent. Possibly, she is right, after all, she is the outside observer. I used to think it was my capacity for empathy that appealed to people, my listening skills and my willingness to meet them halfway as a human being talking to another human being. We all have an accent, even my American friends have their regional dialects, yet, true, some of us sound more foreign than others, and some of us sound more European than others. And yes, I have to say that I do notice a certain Eurocentrism among the people I talk to in the streets of NYC, a tendency to like European accent and associate more prestige with it. But then, when I go “back” to Europe, I roll my “r” like Americans do. In Spain I get away easily as an American, and, believe it or not, they like that, too. (Forget about the alleged hostility towards Americans, or maybe it is my personal charm, after all.) What bothers me, nevertheless, is that I have come to the realization, shocking in itself, that I have gradually acquired an accent in all my languages: I speak my mother tongue with an accent in the US, though I get back my native speaker fluency whenever I return and as soon as my plane hits the ground of my country, which I always experience as a small miracle. Moreover, I become exceedingly chatty in my second language as well, though that is the language I was taught to define myself against as a minority, which was the most evil and preposterous thing ideology and politics could have done to me, a child bilingual from birth.

Oh, the joys of an accented self! Have I already blogged about this? I’ll leave it up to Luke to decide, the kindest censor of all!

This is reference to one of my favorite movies directed by one of my favorite directors, Pedro Almodovar, called All about My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre, 1999). It is a hilarious comedy, and more than that, as Almodovar’s movies frequently are.

I am hijacking the title here because I am thinking a lot about my own Mother these days. (Of course this post will be my most personal ever.) So, my Mother is coming to town this summer. First time in New York City, first time in the US, and this is a big thing, really big. (Explains why I had little sleep during this past weekend, tracking my Mother, via my cell, on her way “down” to Bucharest for her visa interview, and back “home,” in the northern areas of the country. In the absence of Luke’s usual, gentle nudge, I forgot about my Cacophony rotation as well, mea culpa.)

My Mother does not speak English. She is a most successful professor of Hungarian in Romania, piling up awards of teaching excellence and shuffling her “kids” around the country from one competition to another, and they usually win, if not the first prize, than one of the remaining accolades. Her lifeline is her language and her strong ethnic identity. And now that I have started to live in the expectation of her coming, I can also understand the eternal immigrant conundrum: having parents who become a burden because they do not speak the host language.

Yet, my Mother is a charmer, and much of her charm comes from her talk, though I think she is quite a beauty as well. (Arabic has a concept of seduction through words: “samar” means literally “talking late into the night” while investing into the power of words in order to seduce the beloved. Reminder that our “Western” obsession with the body underestimates language and the communication of thoughts.) In an English-speaking environment, my Mother will lose her most important tool: her ability to reach out to people and to seduce her listeners into an appreciation of her intellect. I, on the other hand, will get the chance to be there for her with my English. Translating their mothers, daughters reach a home.

photo credit: zinjixmaggir

This will probably read like the redux of a redux, or, at least, thoughts along Jennifer’s line, but I have been thinking about this since I attended a recent meeting at Baruch where a faculty member expressed concern about Baruch students not speaking Standard American English in the classroom. I was taken aback a bit for several reasons. First, though we are in a predominantly business and marketing-oriented context (versus, let’s say, my former job at Hunter, a Liberal Arts college), we do not seem to look at language as a communication tool within a global market context. I understand that we want to provide our students with solid (American) education, but they will probably work in an international context, if they do not already live there given that sheer existence in NYC is international.

The other thing is my desire to defend Baruch students. None of those I have worked with so far seemed careless about their assignment at hand, at least, when it came to oral presentations, and they did not use “slang” while presenting. Now, that they were using a more informal language among themselves, even with me, that is a different issue and anybody with any understanding of how language works would see why they do so.

While I was completing a degree in Sociolinguistics, our daily mantra was the idea of “context” and how language use always depends upon a specific language context necessitating code-switching. One qualifies as a skillful language-user being able to switch from one linguistic register to another, moving smoothly from one social context to another and being able to understand the intricacies involved.