MikePadgett.com

Don’t let me be misunderstood

— Warning: linguistic variety can damage the quality of your own native language.”

Language means many things to many people. When starting a conversation in Brussels, where over 30% of residents are foreigners, language is the topical hors d’oeuvre to a main course of holidays, family traditions and cultural differences.

Anodyne it may be, but language is a talking point that includes everyone.

Taking it on the chin

At the national level in Belgium, language is also a political issue, driving both debate and dissent in a complex cultural dispute that often baffles foreign spectators.

Flanders speaks Flemish, Wallonia speaks French. A few folks in the bottom right corner speak German, but they tend to be sidelined in favour of the bloody boxing match between the two giants.

They’re going the distance and no-one can say where things will end.

Brussels stands between them, a rather partial referee that ignores all blows below the belt. The capital occupies Flemish turf but mostly speaks French. Having won the early rounds, francophony marches on spreading ever outwards in a fight for the periphery in which both boxers want to be king of the Ring.

Source: Wikipedia Commons

If you as a foreigner arrive without skills in either language, Flemish might sound like a cart rattling along to market, or the peculiar, Belgian-accented French as an unpolished brass band, as blissfully unaware as an animal.

You’ll quickly make firm friends out of both fighters, then perhaps witness their strange and tangled struggle with a twist of self-satisfied pity.

Yet as soon as you start to communicate in one tongue or the other, you’re a partisan. The boxing bout transforms into tag team wrestling. You’re the talisman of one and a traitor to the other.

The dastardly deeds of the devilish Doctor Diction

Meanwhile, you need to watch your own back. Creeping up on every Anglophone is the nightmarish figure of Doctor Diction. This pernicious predator lurks everywhere. He’s perilous to the unsuspecting native English speaker.

His preferred moment to strike is carefully chosen to coincide with the preoccupation you have with making yourself understood. When you’re at your most earnest, he’ll be waiting to infect you, the latest victim of his diabolical disease.

Following an incubation period which lasts around two months, the insidious initial symptoms of Doctor Diction’s premeditated malefaction are difficult to diagnose, but as the sickness grows severe, in the hapless hero(ine) the effects are manifest.

Within just a few weeks, your sentences will start with adverbs. There may be a trace of double negatives.

Between four and five months, your adjectives will follow your nouns instead of preceding them. Your tenses will be slackened, your pronouns perished.

Eventually, when hope is all but lost, you will start to exhibit what they call Doctor Diction’s Crippling Cacophony. In disbelief, you witness yourself gibbering gobfuls of abject American.

Your case is terminal: you have contracted the Euroaccent.

What treatments are available? Regular doses of English prose containing a brew of such restorative herbs as alliteration, metaphor and latinate vocabulary. This is available under the counter without prescription from your nearest Dickens, Shakespeare or Hardy.

These remedies can help in the short term, but let it be said that the Doctor’s grip is as notorious as his grimace.

With continued exposure to the spores of badly translated signage, forcibly decelerated speech and a peculiarly pestilential strain of Second Language Stagiaire’s Disease, a terminal case is inevitable unless the patient can be quarantined to his or her country of origin as a matter of emergency.

There’s an urban myth that Doctor Diction’s unfettered frenzy can be fairly frustrated. This is a house of cards of hearsay, you understand, but persistent whispers describe an underground resistance movement operating from a base deep in the tunnels of the Brussels metro, whose members never surface during daytime and feed off rats at nighttime.

Rumours gathered pace about a possible cure when a correctly stated advertising message was recently discovered in Arts-Loi station. They said it showed poetic perfection in slogan and strapline.

But Doctor Diction declares it a fiction
Tears it down to avoid the friction
Covers the spot with a different lot -
Posters for modern art exhibits
That exist not

As you can see, I have yet to suffer the worst of this illness. But be assured, dear reader, that I am surely sick.

Already I am not having so many problems but I think – in the future – there is going to be for me somethings that were not working incorrect.