I had a lovely, sprawling conversation with F this morning, catching up on the events of the past few months.
One of the many questions that she asked me was if I have a different personality when I’m speaking Serbian. I hadn’t thought about it before, but I definitely do. I don’t speak much in my Serbian-language conversations. I ask rather boring questions: “what’s new with you?” “what did you do last night/over the weekend/etc.?” “how is your family?” and then make non-committal replies to others’ responses: “nice,” “interesting,” “really?” I also smile and nod a lot. That is not too similar to my English-language personality.
F called the new, Serbian-language me a ‘politician’s wife,’ friendly but a bit boring (except she didn’t say the boring part – she’s too tactful for such things).
This is good motivation to keep up with my language study. Maybe in a few more months I will develop a halfway tolerable Serbian-language personality.
2 Comments:
At 7:55 PM,
Bg anon said…
A lot of men who learn Serbian quite well adopt a rather macho approach to the language / persona - swearing a lot, acting as if they couldnt give a damn and being rude whilst driving around the country.
Another thing to watch out for is the pitch of your voice - does it change when you speak Serbian or not? Then again if you are a smoker and live in Serbia for a few years its likely your voice will get more like gravel anyway.
At 2:40 AM,
Anonymous said…
Allyson used to make fun of me for being much more of a smartass in Spanish. I think the end of our year in Ecuador mostly brought my English and Spanish personalities into line, but it took a long long time.
ps - Hi! I'm so glad that Allyson found your blog so I can read it too!
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