Kuta, the touristic district of Bali, is known for its overcrowded streets. Day and night, these streets are filled with cars, motorbikes and taxis trying to pick you up and drop you off anywhere in Bali for an overpriced ride. Shops fill those streets with merchants parading their products on the tiny sidewalks. Each time someone passes by, merchants point at one of their random products and say "This!" or "Ok!" to attract the attention of the potential buyer. Those English words that merchants barely understand are used to confuse a tourist and get him to buy a product he does not necessarily need or want.
During recess week, my friends and I decided to go and visit Kuta. It has very beautiful and clean beaches, many shops to browse and restaurants that serve delicious food. My friends and I assumed that speaking a different language than the local population would be a barrier for understanding the Balinese culture and society. Fortunately, many locals spoke English.
What was hard to notice at the beginning of our trip is that the English that we used seemed complicated to the locals. We had to repeat every sentence many times until it was understood. Thus, if we asked “Can I have some rice please?”, a local would hardly understand the question. The local would take each word in this question, literally translate it into Balinese and then combine the words in his mother tongue using the same word combination in English. As a result, he would not understand what we said because the question made no sense to him.
After many trials, we finally understood that it was easier for the locals to understand us if we stopped using long sentences and replaced them by one or two word phrases while taking a break between words. For instance, the question asked above would get transformed into “My friend … I want… One rice… Ok?” (It also becomes easier to communicate if we used a deep accent in English). In other words, when we started using ‘broken English’ to talk with a native from Bali, it was easier communicate with him.
Having a common language helps in avoiding intercultural miscommunication but one has to take into consideration the culture and the society in which this language is used, because the words might have the same meaning but how you use them differs from one culture/society to another.
Funny to hear that! I have the same experience from teaching a Polish friend some Swedish. When trying to teach him a sentence in "proper" Swedish, with my Stockholm accent, he could barely follow, and when he repeated what I'd just said, he pronounced the i:s in a nasal way, which in Swedish means that you have a posh dialect. Never thought I had one of those. Anyways. Just like you, I changed my way of speaking after a while. I started to talk like a foreigner who tries to speak Swedish. Guess if it worked? He actually still remembers what I taught him, which is impressing, because he was shit faced during the language lesson.
ReplyDeleteThe way of starting to speak broken English has also gotten me in to embarrasing situations sometimes. Here in Singapore, almost everyone you come across speak English. But sometimes I don't understand them and they don't understand me because of our different accents. So, severel times, I've started to talk broken English, like I've done in other Asian countries when facing communication difficulties. And then, the people I've tried to talked to have gotten offended, because really, there's nothing wrong with their English skills. And personally, I've felt like a very stupid Ang Mo.
Thanks for an interesting post Rami about how it is still English, but not exactly English.
ReplyDeleteI think that it is another case of 'same same but different'
I concur with Anna's ending comments, you might want to be careful about whom you apply it to. Otherwise you might end up looking very condescending (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxuEBUXJ2rQ)
Thanks, Rami, for this well described scenario. I like the way you contextualize your experience by first describing the Kuta area. Those details give the reader a clear sense of "being there." I also like the way you've focused on language use, and the way that English has been transformed by the locals to suit their needs. It's something like getting back to the basics, isn't it? "Rice, ok?"
ReplyDeleteMy only qualm here is that idea of "broken English." Wouldn't it be better just to suggest that the English language norms for merchants in Kuta have eveolved in their own way, to suit the needs of the users? By calling that usage "broken," you are assuming a certain superior claim to the language.
What do you think?