Strictly Speaking (Foreigners Sound Funny)

The accent of one's birthplace remains in the mind and in the heart as in one's speech.
~Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Speaking another language is so much more complex than new words and grammar. Its about learning how people really communicate. And sometimes, learning to speak their language means changing the way you speak your own.

Russian has several strange sounds from the perspective of an English speaker. Letters that are unique to Russian, and a couple of letters that even have no sound of their own; their presence influences the sound of the preceding letter.

Of course, I speak with an American accent. People tell me (not just friends but strangers, even) that it isn’t too bad at all. I’ve been pegged for a Serbian, a Turk, a Ukrainian, and several other nationalities by folks who either don’t hear, or probably didn’t expect, an American accent. Memorably, one friend said “Oh, people think you’re Russian; they just think you’re retarded.”

But its how you use an English word that really causes problems. At Джонни Толстяк, an Italian restaurant charmingly named Fat Johnny’s, they serve a pretty good business lunch. There the forte is pizzas – individual, thin crust served on a wooden pizza board. Most are predictably named by their ingredients, but several are named by theme.

Now, New York is a word that is close enough in Russian to the English pronunciation to not cause problems. But others have enough differences to derail cross-cultural communication – such as it is in a pizza joint in Moscow.
At lunch, I ordered. “Девушка дайте, пожалуйста, пиццу “Chicago”. Which I pronounce the way I’ve always pronounced it; shi-KAH-go.
“Какую?”, she said, cluelessly.
Finally, she gets it.
“Ahhh,” she says. “Чикаго!” which she pronounces with a strong CH sound, hard E, and unvoiced O at the end. That is to say, more like “cheek-AH-ga.”

At my favorite blini stand they have one called the “E-mail”. I don’t know why a Russian blini with mushrooms and cheese is called the E-mail, but it is. Anyway, its written in English on the menu. So I pronounce it in English – which is all wrong. Their pronunciation of the English word is more like “E-mile”.

So in both cases, I’ve given myself away as a foreigner. Not through bad Russian; given away instead by my good English. Oh, the bitter, bitter irony of it.

I’ve come to learn, though, that this kind of restating is a two way street. At work, my colleagues all speak English wonderfully. Of course, they have accents. But not strong enough to be an impediment to understanding. Still, they’ve learned through experience that the proper pronunciation of their names will cause all sorts of problems with others in the English speaking world.

So Aleksandr, on the phone, breaks his name down slowly into Alexander. He’d probably never use his nickname of Sasha; first, its too informal, and secondly, its considered feminine in the west. Andrei becomes a carefully elocuted Andrew. Last names are offered even more slowly, and syllable by syllable. Usually a couple of times.

It reminds me of when I worked with an Australian guy in New York. He would say his name as he always had his whole life. But when he got on the phone, he would have to put on his American accent and over pronounce most of the letters that he habitually left out. "Maht’n" became "maRtin" for the benefit of his audience.

So speaking another language, it turns out, is a lot trickier than I had previously thought.