I have a little confession to make. I often abuse my status as a foreigner - as well as the general perception that the English are all monolingual - for my own good. When approached by some market researcher/charity collector/general annoying timewaster, I simply smile apologetically, tell them I'm English, and walk away. It works almost all of the time; I have only been challenged once, and then I just ran away before he could catch me.
What makes it worse is how I do it: to make it more effective, I say, "Pardonn, je sweez on-glay" in my best (that is to say, worst) British accent, and deliberately make the gender agreement error in order to reinforce my linguistic incompetence. I discovered the hard way that people are less likely to believe that you don't understand what you're saying when you reply, "Chuis anglaise," in a reasonably authentic French accent; imagine a foreigner trying to fob you off by saying, "Sorry, mate, don't have a scooby doo what you're on about," in an Eastenders accent.
Of course, that trick works less and less these days with the growth of globalisation. Everybody speaks English these days and it's getting harder to use as an excuse for getting out of talking to somebody. A few years back, I was in Paris with my boyfriend at the time, and we were constantly getting hassled by beggars. Telling them we were English never helped because they'd learnt their spiel in several languages for the tourists. In the end, we pretended to be German: as soon as they approached, he rattled off a list of phrases he'd learnt from playing Medal of Honour, such as, "Can I see your papers, please?," "Look out, he's got a Bazooka!" and, "The American has dog biscuits in his pocket." They usually went away fairly quickly; I'm not sure if it's because they didn't understand German, or because they did and they decided they didn't want to be near anyone with a Bazooka or dog biscuits in his pocket.
Still, I'm not sure if even German would work as a shield against being harassed any more, as we become more and more multilingual. Hopefully, my conversational Arabic will help for a few more years yet, although it could potentially get me into trouble as I've learnt most of it from Hakim songs so most of the phrases I know are just chat-up lines. And, you never know, learning Irish Gaelic one weekend when I was bored may well come in useful in this respect one day. At the very least, there's always the Latin - as long as I never get asked to fill in a questionnaire by a public schoolboy or the Pope.
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My sister's boyfriend tried that in Turkey years ago when being hassled in the covered bazaar by speaking Welsh - the look on his face when the trader answered him in Welsh was a picture ;)
ReplyDeleteThat is brilliant! I'd love to know how that came about...
ReplyDeleteA Scottish friend of mine is half-Portuguese and thus bilingual. She and her mother were sitting in a café in Glasgow one day, bitching about one of the other customers in Portuguese. They were amazed when they got up to leave and the woman told them in fluent Portuguese that she had understood every word they'd said. It's not a language you expect to find in Glasgow!