Talk the talk

Time of India

4 days ago

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative. LESS ... MORE
The globalisation of English has taken a lot of the foreignness out of foreign travel
Bunny and I are in Torino, Italy. And Bunny is eager to try out the conversational Italian she has picked up through assiduous practice on the Duolingo app on her cell phone.
We go for a morning coffee to Caffe Mulassano, the 118-year-old establishment that looks like what the inside of an antique jewel box should look like, all burnished gleam and gilded glow.
Buongiorno, vorremmo due cappuccini, deka per me, normale per lui, Bunny says in her best Duolingo Italian.
Okay, two cappuccinos, one decaf, and one regular coming right up, says the barista, sounding like she's been displaced from Queens, NYC.
It's like that wherever we go. Bunny asks for directions to a restaurant or wherever else we want to go, in punctilious Italian. The reply is almost invariably in English.
It was very different when we first visited Italy in 1973. We didn't have a word of Italian, and no locals spoke anything else. We got by with an extempore hit-and-miss mixture of sign language, guesswork, and strokes of sudden inspiration.
It made simple things, like ordering a meal, or asking the way to the train station, into a dramatic adventure, an exciting exploration of an exotic linguistic landscape. It made foreign feel foreign.
Now, everyone, everywhere, in Europe, even in France which once shunned les anglais like a socially transmitted disease, will break into Anglo-Saxon at the drop of a chat.
A linguistic pandemic, English spans the globe, hurdling geographic borders and cultural boundaries like a vocal virus. And the more you try to speak to the local citizenry in their language, the more you'll prompt a response in English, the speaker seizing this opportunity to demonstrate a grasp of what has become the most cosmopolitan of all languages, thanks to global commerce, Hollywood, and the lyrics of pop music. While this makes for ease of communication, it takes much of the foreignness out of foreign.
So we look forward to our next port of call, where no one speaks English at all. It'll make for a nice change when we get to London.
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