Languages

I'm always thinking about languages down here, since it's what I'm here for. But the last few days have been really kind of remarkable for me.

For starters, I've been doing some translating between language pairs that I'm not used to. Now I've gotten to the point where translating between English and French or English and Spanish, or even French and Spanish, is not that tough. I'm not perfect, and there are some rough patches, but it's not taxing. However, over the last couple weeks, I've had to interpret a couple times going from Guianese Creole to Spanish, and once between Haitian Creole and Portuguese. I think that it shows the remarkable multilingualism of the region, and how much people are expected to speak each other's languages. As one man put it to me, when we get here, we're just kind of obligated to learn all these languages. Now this isn't a legal obligation, or even a logistical one. If you want to speak French with everyone, you will basically have no problems. And yet, people feel the pull to learn other languages.

Also, apparently it's not rude to speak a language with someone that others in the conversation don't share. This was weird for me. Today, I went past Alex's workplace, and I saw that he was there with his daughter and two other people. They called me in and they invited me to chat a bit. It turned out that the two other people were from St. Lucia, a Caribbean island with a French creole and English as the two official languages.    I struggled to find a way to be inclusive: I started with French, but then they seemed to not speak French. I tried Creole (breaking out my one sentence of St. Lucian Creole), but then they invited me to speak English, which Alex doesn't speak. But he didn't seem to mind. So I used English, which I rarely use here, and we switched into Creole every so often.

And then at the market, I used Creole more freely, which I don't usually do because so many people reacted negatively when I first tried it when I arrived. But now, I think word about me has spread in the market, so people don't think I'm condescending when I use it. One woman was particularly surprised to hear me use it when she mistook cornmeal for fine manioc flour and I politely asked if she was sure. And of course, sometimes my knowledge is used as a means of sending the grandchildren of Haitian immigrants on guilt trips because they don't speak it and I do. It's nice that some things, like guilt, are present everywhere.