Amelia
I Broke Spring this year in Paris (Pah-reeeee), my first time there since I was 20 when I went with my longsuffering mother, dragging her petulant art-school grumpy-teen daughter from Louvre to Pompidou kicking and screaming. This time my agenda included: seeing my sister and her band perform, taking some photos for a friend’s fashion endeavour, and meeting up with an old friend’s Moroccan family. After my ridiculously long day’s journey into night and then day again, I arrived at Charles De Gaulle and immediately started feeling foreign. In PART 1 of this text you can read my ponderings on the linguistic landscape of Paris. In PART 2 you can read a description of the more intimate linguistic landscape of my week in Paris, among friends from here who were there for various reasons (it is less about language and more about a week in Paris: photos to follow)
PART 1: THOUGHTS
All of the signs indicating for one to continue going straight (as opposed to turning left or right) use a down rather than an up arrow. Already the visual landscape required attentive rather than passive consumption. The audio cues were in French, English and Spanish on the train platforms. The trains came, in sequence, onto the same platform with the same terminus but many different destinations – ATTENTION! was required.
The audio recordings instructing passengers of both standard security (do not leave your bags unattended) and important (train X is direct to terminus) messages were spoken in a version of English so accented as to literally be unintelligible. I started to think about this line – the line crossed to make language unintelligible to a listener, and that it exists both in the expressive and receptive side of communication. Whether a communication is intelligible is determined by the listener about the speaker; any given speaker-and-listener pair might arrive at a different conclusion about intelligibility. What caught my ear that jetlagged morning about these recorded messages was the lag in time it took me to reinterpret the English I was hearing and how heavily I relied on the FR message to understand the EN. On replaying the EN message in my head I realized almost every vowel was inaccurate. In my work with developmental speech and language disorders, and indeed with adults recovering from stroke and TBI, it is vowels which are known to affect intelligibility more than consonants, and which are more indicative of pathology. An example from the Paris train recordings would be the word luggage. There are two syllables, each of which contains a vowel. The translation of the text to be read had added the error of pluralizing the no-count word to Luggages and both vowels had been rendered inaccurately, such that the word became closer to lou-gauge-ease. In the run of a sentence, this also means that the suprasegmentals are affected – it is hard for the listener to determine where the spaces between words are.
Just prior to leaving on this trip, I had read and re-read a blog post a buddy from back in my translation days shared with me about interpreting our written corrections of second language errors in English with the same lens we would an accent bias. While I certainly think of myself as a descriptivist and I have described the sub-field of my profession which concerns itself with “accent reduction” or “accent modification” as being “the plastic surgery of speech language pathology”, I can also be fairly unforgiving when it comes to poorly translated signs at the Pompidou or poorly interpreted announcements on public transit. This blog post had me reflecting on whether my intelligibility judgements about accented announcements and disdain for poorly translated informational texts might, in fact, be linguistic prejudices. As Erin Carrie points out in the blog, “some degree of conformity to agreed linguistic norms is essential for effective communication but these norms can be redefined and, even, subverted where appropriate” and I wonder whether, in this case, there is a representation of French Nationalism, a pride in the very Frenchness that these accents and translations convey, which I am resisting. After all, how would one otherwise know one were travelling, when visiting large cosmopolitan centres, were it not for the accents on trains, the mistranslated signage, the Droits De L’Homme engraved in every other building?
And speaking of accent judgements: I have not been subjected to the “switch” so many travelevers complain of when attempting to speak French in Montreal – but boy were my Parisian interlocutors ready not only to switch to English but also, as one neighbour from my apartment building did, to point out that “vous n’êtes pas française!” to which I replied “ah non. J’ai un accent.” and she exclaimed “Oui! Un grand accent!”
PART 2: FUN
In the apartment in the Senegalese quarter of the 18ième where I was being hosted were my Montreal Francophone friend, Virginie, her Moroccan husband, Khalid, and her two Canadian citizen sons, Hélias (9) and Yannis (3) who are growing up between Marrakesh, Paris and Montreal, speaking French (at school and at home) and Arabic (at home). Her son Hélias scolded us every time we switched to English, which we tend not to do much. We started to do so intentionally, telling Hélias it would help him learn. He did start to think of our ‘secret code’ as a challenge and began attempting translations as we spoke. Virginie, I noticed, sometimes used Arabic to get disciplinary with her sons when their father was not around, a single word in that language and in a certain tone having, it seemed, a weight of authority in their household. In describing an incident on the street where we had overheard some shouting at a distance, Hélias described the shouting as being “en arab ou en wolof” – I was impressed by his ear and metalinguistic awareness. Both brothers were very good at interpreting for me if we went into shops, helping me count my coins, offering information about which stores carried what items and, especially Hélias, rewording when he could see from my face I had missed something (ex: une glace – crème glacée). This skill develops earlier in children navigating more than one language and culture and is, I find, fascinating to watch, relying as it does on so much context, inferencing, empathy, theory of mind – truly the interaction of language and developmental socio-emotional skills cannot be overstated.
Upon meeting up with my sister’s band, we walked along a canal as a small film crew shot them performing a song. My sister is from Montreal (Anglo bilingual), her two bandmates are from BC (no French) and Ontario (some French) and her soundman is from Montreal (Franco bilingual). I walked along, trailing the film crew with a lovely young producer from rural France and we chatted about Paris, Montreal, the weather, the arts, etc. She observed that Parisians “manquent de curiosité” (lack curiosity) contrasting the people walking blankly past a saxophonist-and-a-singer-with-a-cigar-box-guitar on this Paris canal with the tourists who stop and listen when they film in other parts of the city.
After the shoot was done, my sister and her BC bandmate and I walked around, speaking English to one another and French to shopkeepers. My friend Virginie arrived with her clothes to be photographed and we all switched to French, our silent BC photographer snapping pics as the three of us spoke, occasionally forgetting he couldn’t understand us. We all went out to supper, but my sister felt tired and elected to nap instead. We were seated at a lovely little Basque restaurant and the table spoke French until my sister left, the numbers then dictating a shift to English. I found myself suddenly struggling in English. I was describing a nut and had to ask the table whether a nut came in a shell (by now I had a full-on head cold and had slept about 2 hours over the past 72). Through the cloud of fatigue, I felt the weight of language as a tool to wield, but still was shocked at the feeling of shell in my mother tongue stumping me: all I could see was a seashell in my mind and my BC and Ontario pals were trying to reassure me that a nut could have both a husk and a shell.
For the next few days I stayed with my lovely little host family, shopping for fabrics with Virginie, helping with some work at the local theatre, colouring with Hélias, watching Yannis master the “trotinette” on the sidewalks of the 18ième. Goodbyes were made tearfully at 5 am at their train transfer for Orly. I rode back as the sun rose, finally disembarking to walk around for hours in the dreary grey weather that lasted my whole week there. On my own for the next three days: I ate cheeses, drank wines, visited the odd museum and saw entirely too much art for one day at the Pompidou. I took photos of shops called “thanks god I’m a star” and “pardon my french” and various other cutesy anglofetishistic alterations to the linguistic landscape, including “fuck your morals” and “Danger love 4 u” graffiti. I also made a point of turning my phone to airplane mode. I love nothing more than getting lost and relying on strangers, if need be, to get home again. Along the Canal St. Martin I chatted with a number of locals (the best way to spot a local in any large city is to look for someone at the end of a dog’s leash) in attempts to navigate my way back to where I wanted to be using my terrible sense of direction and their willingness to help. As is often the case for me, when travelling, though, there is really no place I would rather be than chatting to a stranger about how to get somewhere.
