SORRY, I DON’T SPEAK ENGLISH

The following conversations in SPANISH THROUGHOUT were recently held between a very friendly bar waitress and myself in a cafe in Estación San Roque.

Me: A beer please.

Waitress: A coffee?

Me: A beer please.

Waitress: A white coffee?

Me: A beer – I’ll have a beer without alcohol.

Waitress: You want a coffee with no milk.

Me: I want a beer!

Fridge door is opened and a bottle of Cruzcampo is waived in my direction. I nod my ascent.

Waitress: Are you English?

Me: Yes.

Waitress: Sorry I don’t speak English.

15minutes later:

Me: Do you have red wine?

Waitress: You want another beer?

Me: Do you have red wine?

Waitress: You want a coffee?

Me: Do you have a Rioja.

Waitress: A Rioja no. I have this red wine – do you want it with white lemonade.

Me: No – I’ll have another beer.

Waitress: Sorry, I don’t speak English.

15 minutes later:

Me: Can I have the bill please.

Waitress: You want another beer?

Me: Can I have the bill please.

Waitress: You want a coffee?

Me: I want the bill! The bill!

Waitress: Oh you want the bill – sorry I don’t speak English.

I should add that between the above conversations I spoke to a seven-year-old girl who I suspect is the daughter of the cafe’s owner. She told me very proudly she spoke English. We had a couple of brief chats – I spoke to her in Spanish – she replied in English. We understood each other perfectly.

There must be a moral to this story – but for the life of me I haven’t a clue what it is.

THE END OF THE Ñ IS NIGH

The pressure is on to simplify Spanish with that pressure coming from modern technology such as the internet. The move has the approval of the Real Academia de Española – the guardian of the language.

In the firing line are the accents and the tilde that are currently major elements in the language but which are not compatible with the world governed by the keyboard or mobile phone key pads.

Victor García de la Concha, the director of the RAE, explained: “To survive, a language has to be used by a large number of people, to have a unified language and to be in tune with technology.”
Therefore the adverb ‘sólo’ along with pronouns such as ‘éste’ and’ aquél’ would all lose their accents and the ‘ñ’ would cease to be. After all – how many people use these accents when sending an SMS message?

The object is to have a language more modern and attractive, simple and dynamic, clear and globalised. There is also a desire to unify the Spanish languages that are spoken in Spain and in Latin America which over the years have developed their own differences.

The RAE is aware that certain English words are now entering the Spanish language and is thinking seriously about adding such words as ‘marketing’, ‘parking’, ‘sex appeal’ whilst others such as ‘sponsor’ have already become ‘espónser’ and ‘CD-ROM’ ‘cederrón’. The internet is of course the internet.

The experts want to see an economisation of the language – the minimum force for the maximum results and to use a reduced number of words to communicate. The RAE says that we use an average of 300 words in sentences whereas in the lexicon of Spanish there are 283 million endings – so only 0.10per cent are used.

The writer and former director of the Instituto Cervantes in London, Juan Pedro Aparico, stated that Spanish was in fashion but added it was more highly valued overseas than in Spain. He also pointed out that in the UK Spanish has taken over from German as the key second language and was running close with French.

According to the magazine ‘Ethnology’ Spanish is the second most spoken mother tongue in the world and occupies third place on the internet after English and Chinese. Over 400 million people currently speak Spanish and by 2050 that is expected to leap to 537 million.

So how do I as a Briton living in Spain feel about these pending changes to the language that has become my adopted tongue? Well having struggled for years with the accents as well as the ñ and come through triumphant I am rather sad that these may now be pushed to one side. Equally I do not approve of the ‘dumbing down’ of the world we live in. Having said that I do see the sense in simplifying and unifying the Spanish language so as to make it more accessible to all. And anybody who has received a SMS message from a Spaniard will know that whatever the RAE might decide the change is already upon us.

SO THAT’S FIVE (OR SIX) LANGUAGES THEN

Across the Spanish border from Gibraltar lies La Línea. The mayor, Juan Carlos Juárez, has called on the Trilateral Forum between Britain, Spain and the Rock to explore the creation of a bilingual cross-border university that will tap the region’s “rich and unique linguistic characteristics”.

In a statement Juárez said the university could draw on the backing of higher-education establishments in both Spain and the UK. “The unique circumstances of La Linea and Gibraltar offer a multitude of areas that could be promoted, for example higher education.”

All very true but when Juárez says bilingual what languages does he mean?

In La Línea they speak Spanish (Castilian), Andaluz and those who work in Gibraltar a dockyard patois of both Spanish and English plus Linense. In Gibraltar they speak English, Spanish although more often than not Andaluz and the Rock’s own language, Llanito.

So which two did he have in mind?

As they say in Gibraltar – “Esta tomate”.

TALKING OF ESPERANTO

When I penned my blog yesterday on Spanish and English my hand hesitated over the keyboard as I debated on whether to include Chinese and Esperanto.

Well I did the former and not the latter. I promptly received a comment from Brian Barker which can be read in full below yesterday’s blog. He stated: “There is an alternative to English (or Spanish) as the dominant World Language, and its name is Esperanto.

Esperanto is now within the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA factbook. It is the 17th most used language in Wikipedia, and in use by Skype, Firefox and Facebook.

Native Esperanto speakers, include George Soros, Ulrich Brandenburg the new German Ambassador to NATO, and World Champion Chess Player, Susan Polger.”

I have known many people in my long life and only one of them was an Esperanto speaker. Indeed he was a fanatic but apart from those people he conversed with at meetings in London he was unable to communicate with any of us around him in that tongue as we only spoke English.

There are an estimated 1,500,000,000 English speakers world-wide and some 417,000,000 Spanish speakers. For Esperanto I found estimates of between 100,000 and two million speakers with only up to 2,000 “native speakers”.

What Esperanto lacks and both English and Spanish have is a solid culture behind the language. In both cases you do not just speak English or Spanish for by being able to do so you open up a rich heritage going back hundreds of years and that is being added to all the time. In addition the two languages gave to the world both Shakespeare and Cervantes – debatably the world’s two greatest writers.

In the unlikely event I have ever to speak to George Soros – I can do so in English. I suspect that apart from his native Hungarian and of course Esperanto, this high cultivated man also has other linguistic strings to his mighty bow.

SPEAKING OF LANGUAGES

When I was young, yes that long ago, we were offered French and German as foreign languages at school. In some schools Spanish was an option but largely thought of as being only useful if you were going to holiday in Benidorm.

French was the first choice being deemed in those far off days as an international language. Well how the world has changed!

Today English is still the number one international lingo albeit American English. Now even the French anglicise their language – le weekend – and everybody seems rather bemused that Spanish is the other pace-setter.

Spanish is the second or third most spoken language in the world depending on whether you include Chinese or not. Of course it is also a major language in the USA because of the large number of Hispanic immigrants.

Both England and Spain have one thing in common – they are the minority nations in which the languages they originated are now spoken. Spanish is the first language of choice for much of southern and central America whilst English dominates in the USA and Canada. This of course has led to variations of the original mother tongue with the word ‘coger’ having very different meanings in Spain and South America as ‘fag’ does in Britain and the USA.

On Saturday I popped in to my local baker who insisted that he count out my loaves in English – one – two – three – he said with a very satisfied grin. Apparently his son is learning English at school so he is listening carefully to pick up various words. I told him the problem was that his son would only be taught to count from one to ten. “Yes”, he replied, “I asked him the other day what was the English for twelve and he just shrugged his shoulders”.

As English and Spanish are now both major languages it is pleasing to note that the people of Britain and Spain are making such efforts to learn each others tongues.

There are those of course in each of our countries that have rejected English and Spanish for political purposes. Hence you find road signs in Welsh that nobody can understand and in the Basque, Catalan and other ‘separatist’ regions of Spain the local language is pushed to the fore.

Isn’t it ironic as the world gets smaller and English with Spanish take centre stage there are those who in the name of “nationalism” insist on languages being used that even their own people do not speak.