Words with Friends

I've written before about the potential linguistic hazards of immersing yourself in a foreign country, specifically the anxiety that comes with meeting the family that will care and (hopefully) love you for the next few months. You want to make a good impression, maybe crack a witty joke to ease the tension. But the trouble lies in the fact that sometimes the sounds that come out of your mouth are not quite what your inner thought processes were trying to say. 

When a pretty girl comes up to you at a club, carefully bats her eyes, and then asks you something you can barely hear, much less understand, how are you supposed to be the suave, ladies man you know you really are? Hypothetical situation, of course, but a fair example nonetheless of how much language shapes your perceptions and the way you wish to be perceived. 

So maybe you know a bit of Spanish and maybe you're confident that your good looks and charming smile will be enough to win this girl over (I mean, she walked over to you, right?), you're still in the danger zone that is the Spanish language. And what do I mean by that? Well, Spanish is a highly diverse language. Aside from the various forms of Spanish within the Iberian peninsula, the Spanish from Latin America is very different from the Spanish of Spain (as I have so comically learned over the past few months). 

On one of the very first nights of winter quarter when my roommate and I were getting ready to go out, my host mother gave us her best wishes and then said "no se preocupen en coger un taxi al fin de la noche." I stopped mid-whatever I was doing and furrowed my brow- I must not have heard correctly. 

For a moment, I forgot that "coger" in Spain means something very different from what it connotes in Mexico. While she meant to say "don't worry about getting a taxi at the end of the night," I (new to castellano Spanish lingo) was sure she had implied something about having sex in a taxi. Little things like that continued to happen throughout the quarter, though most of them had nothing to do with sex and those that were weren't made in compromising situations. 

Here's a YouTube video some Argentinean friends of mine showed me last quarter after a long weekend of intercultural linguistic exchange, which I think nicely sums up how hard Spanish is to understand even among our own kind: Que difícil es hablar el español (translation: it's hard to speak Spanish)

I'm currently taking a sociology class here that discusses behavior and the messages it communicates. (I absolutely adore this class and will probably write more about it later) but basically, this means that I have been constantly thinking about how our linguistic environment has shaped the roles that we play. Within our families, among our friends, while trying to flirt, even while trying to start up small talk just to get to know a person, how do we negotiate the language barrier in order to convey the right message? How well do we utilize and observe the multitude of communication cues outside of language? Our "words with friends" aren't always what we intend them to be, and to me that is absolutely fascinating.

p.s. a bunch of people in the spring program just came back from visiting Lisbon and it made me nostalgic - hence all the Portugal pictures- holla to all the ladies I traveled with!