There was a Dutch psychologist visiting our Institut last week, which gave me a chance to experience another aspect of European work culture, namely its largely international flavor. Europe is really pouring its heart into the whole European Union thing, by and large, and I'm constantly amazed by the large diversity of Europe-wide initiatives. ERASMUS, the student exchange program and general network of European universities, is an excellent example of this, and meeting students from all over the continent during an ERASMUS semester is quickly becoming a rite of passage for European students (it even has its own cult film!)
Of course, for all of these international connections to work on a logistical level, they need certain practical foundations. One of those foundations is a common language, and English - which has been taught to Western Europeans at all social levels for decades - is the language of choice. And I find that beautiful. Hearing the Austrian flight crew addressing the Italian ground crew on a flight to Rome, for example, with a "Hello. We're happy to be back here," or listening to the lunchtime conversation between my Austrian work colleagues and the visiting Dutch person, who did not speak German, fills me with a strange sense of pride. It's my native language that makes such international exchanges possible, that's being used by millions of people worldwide everyday as a lingua franca, a means of communicating across vast linguistic and cultural divides.
It's a beautiful process, but one I will always look upon as an outsider. My English is not the international, accented, sometimes grammatically incorrect variety that's used un-self-consciously among non-native speakers the world over. My English is idiomatically and grammatically "correct" - mainly because I, as an educated native speaker, am the one whose usage defines correctness. When I open my mouth, the playing field shifts. English is no longer being used as a means of communication, where schoolbook standards matter less than the simple goal of getting one's point across, but as a real language with grammatical rules and idiomatic structures of which one must be mindful. One of my professors last semester told the story of her father, a carpet distributor with horrible English who would gladly speak it with colleagues from other parts of Europe at carpeting conventions. When the British carpet distributors spoke, however, everyone reached for their headsets and began listening to the translations - not because they couldn't understand their British colleagues, but because the power dynamics had shifted. The mere presence of a native speaker makes people self-conscious.
It's the same tension I identified with German last semester: To what extent does "correctness" really matter? When, for example, an Austrian is writing a review of an article by a professor from Iceland for an international journal of psychology, does it really matter that "in consideration" takes "of" as a preposition rather than "from"? Not that there shouldn't be any standards - one of the articles being reviewed by my Institut was so unidiomatic that I found it nearly unreadable - but I have mixed feelings about the proofreading work I'm doing at the Institut. I've worked so hard to free myself from the discourse of correctness and to reach a point where I feel comfortable considering myself fluent in German that I am hesitant to impose this same oppressive ideal, but with English, on my Austrian colleagues.
And that's why I hate speaking English here. I would rather cede power to Austrians, who are, after all, on their home turf, than take it for myself by conversing in my native language. When I throw random English words into my German (like all Austrians do), I say them like an Austrian would, and I sometimes wish I could actually speak English with a foreign accent. Today, for example, I was hanging out with two Austrians when we were approached by a man from Fly Emirates, who asked us in English if we wanted to play a trivia game to try and win airline tickets. And I felt so self-conscious about answering in my American accent. I felt entdeckt - discovered, spotted. For Austrians, English is unavoidable, a part of everyday life in an internationalized Europe. And the fact that my relationship with the language is so different than theirs is yet another factor that separates me from them. It certainly has its advantages, but it's something that, no matter how good at German I become and how much I learn about Austrian culture, I can never change.
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