Alone and Unobserved

[Updated: Friday, May 18, 2007, 8:20 AM]

I had a lot of fun in Canada (if you haven’t figured that out already). One of the things that made me the happiest, though, that made me feel confident and successful, was the opportunity to prove myself in French every day. To illustrate, I’ll mention a conversation I had with an English speaker on the subject of speaking French in Montréal.

Did it irritate me, she asked, when Montrealers would switch into English after hearing my accented French?

Um, not really, I prevaricated. I looked away uncomfortably. To be honest, I mumbled, it didn’t usually happen to me. In fact, my problem was the opposite.

She shook her head uncomprehendingly, and I quickly changed the subject. But I was telling the truth: most of the time, when I was introduced to a Montrealer, they assumed I was a native French speaker of some kind, if not completely fluent in joual (Québécois French)To hear an example of joual, listen to this clip from Les Trois Accords‘ song Laisse-Moi., and they would race off at a mile a minute, letting their A’s broaden and their consonants disappear. As they unleashed volley after volley of slang, I just nodded my head wisely and tried to keep up. But I was astonished and overjoyed to discover that I usually could keep up, even with Stéphanie, whose diction and pronunciation were distinctly joual no matter what she did, and who always talked at breakneck speed even when she was trying to slow down.

Which is to say that my French is doing fine. It’s not perfect—and it really hurts me to realize how much better I used to speak, and how far I have to go—but I can make myself understood, and my accent is still fairly intact. What worries me is that, while I would love to become fluent in listening to Québécois, and even in speaking it, I don’t want it to contaminate my prissy French accent. The thought honestly keeps me up at night (why do you think I’m blogging about it at 2:00 in the morning?). I guess I can cross that bridge when I come to it, though.

Now that my French is in resurgence, however, I’ve been despairing over my ability in Italian. I talk to myself pretty much constantly (yes, out loud), and lately, whenever I’ve tried to carry on a conversation with myself in Italian (stop laughing!) it has come out in French, or as gibberish. Well, after today, you all have permission to slap me if you hear me complaining about that anymore.

I’ve spoken Italian at work before, but I’ve never actually used it for my job. This afternoon a woman came up to the reference desk, and halfway through asking me if we had a certain book, she saw my nametag, and broke off to ask if I really spoke Italian. When I said Sì, I did, she switched to Italian and began waxing rapturous.

I had no accent, she said. She was from Venice, and she had never met an American who had no accent. It was amazing.

We went over to the stacks to find the books she wanted, and she introduced me to her husband, an American who definitely did have an accent in Italian.

He’s from Califonia, but he has no accent! she told him.

Really? her husband said. How do you do it? he asked me.

È semplicemente così, I replied; that’s just the way it is.

They showed me their beautiful baby daughter, and she gurgled at me as I showed them the section they were looking for, and then I walked off with the biggest, stupidest grin on my face. I had no accent! Ha!

Now, it’s true that when she told me I “had no accent,” she probably meant I didn’t sound like an American, not that I had a perfect Italian accent (although what that would mean, when there are 1,001 “perfect” regional Italian accents, I’m not sure). But I evidently have no cause yet to mourn the loss of my language skills; even though I don’t get the chance to practice as often as I would like (i.e., every day), I’m still doing fine.

Not to blow my own horn, of course.

[Update: I should perhaps note that "not having an accent" in Italian wasn't necessarily an advantage as a Mormon missionary in Southern Italy. Besides causing the usual difficulty (see: the paragraphs on joual), it also meant I wasn't immediately identified as an American, which was usually in our favor. Italians (at least young Italians—or rather, young, Southern Italians) love Americans, and that was inadvertently one of our biggest selling points. Well, not selling points for getting baptized, per se, since hardly anyone did that. But it kept people talking to us far longer than they otherwise would have.]