So, I don’t have to blog for PLA this summer. However, I do have to blog weekly for my PIRE research grant that sent me to the Netherlands, so I figured I might as well keep up my Sunday evening/Monday morning postings routine by also posting my blogs to the PLA site!
Exactly a week ago, I arrived to my apartment at Radboud University after having gotten on the plane at the Newark airport over 12 hours earlier. The journey from the Amsterdam-Schiphol airport to Nijmegen wasn’t without its confusion, but that part was comparatively easy. Once we got to our apartment complex and realized that 1) we didn’t know how to use the keys they gave us to get into the building, 2) once we got into the building we didn’t have towels as part of our linen package, and 3) there was no wifi in the apartment but rather a somewhat finicky Ethernet cable, that was when the true journey began.
We spent most of the day on Monday as we traipsed around town on a hunt for towels and free wifi realizing what it really means to be a bilingual society. Before arriving, we knew that most people in The Netherlands are bilingual in Dutch and English—that’s why we came here, after all. What we didn’t quite know, though, was how that works in an everyday context. As it turns out, both languages can be found almost anywhere you go, but rarely as direct translations of one another.
The most common example I have seen of this is signs that have information written in both languages, but that give different information. For example, many signs at Radboud have the header written in English but then the description in Dutch. Some clothing shops we have found downtown use a similar system. This means that while we have a general idea what is happening, we can never be quite sure because we can’t read the description. Menus in restaurants, on the other hand, tend to be entirely in Dutch. We have learned to order food by using cognates, relying on the Dutch words that we have learned over the past week, and when necessary, just giving up and asking if they have an English menu available.
For me, not being able to read the language is perhaps more of a surprise and harder to deal with than not being able to speak it. I tend to spend more time reading and writing than I do speaking, so not talking to people isn’t much of a change for me. I know I can handle it. But I don’t remember a time before I could read, and I have always enjoyed figuring out my surroundings by observation—I tune out conversation and instead read all the signs I can find and put things together. Now that has become much harder because less than half of all words on signs are in a language that I know. While I was expecting not to be able to follow overheard conversations, I never actually thought about incidental learning through reading until I got here.
Instead, I have learned to spend more time listening to conversations—and it has been very interesting. Most people are speaking in Dutch, and though I am still far from knowing the language I can segment the speech stream better today than I could just one week ago. I enjoy listening for the cognates, for the Dutch words I know, and especially for the code switches. I have heard a surprising amount of intra-sentential code switches that consist only of an English curse word or English slang before switching back to Dutch. Every time, I can’t help but wonder: is cursing more common here than in the United States, or am I simply more aware of it here because it is what I understand? I have also heard conversations among Dutch-English bilinguals switch languages completely after a number of turns, as well as inter-sentential code switches in a single speaker. Of course, I almost always facilitate a language switch: when somebody approaches me and begins speaking in Dutch, I will say “I’m sorry, English please? (Sorry, Engels alsjeblieft?)” and they immediately switch to English—I have even had a cashier switch to English as soon as she heard me say “Hello.”
I have learned that a bilingual society is not the same thing as those signs in Lowe’s that are written in English but also have Spanish translations. A bilingual society is run with the expectation that people can use both languages effectively, so languages can be chosen to best fit the information to be conveyed. Languages can be used separately or together. For the visitor who only knows the secondary language it takes some work to figure out what is going on, but I can already tell that these two months will be a great experience in both taking risks and asking for help.
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