Monday, May 17, 2010

About the language issue

After I came from a great intercultural exchange in the Basque Country (Spain) where I heard people speaking both in Spain and it Basque (no idea where does this language come from), I went back home - in Portugal - by train. This train crosses the entire Spain and reaches Portugal in about 9 hours. As soon as you get out of Spain, all the staff on the train switches from Spanish to Portugal, as if they  had a 6th sense which tells them when to do so. The thing is that, when I was just about to arrive at my final destination and I was preparing to get off the train, I fainted. Just out of the blue, I felt unbearably sick. I remember a lot of people gazing at me desperately and asking me - in Portuguese, of course - how did I feel. Since I was too sick to articulate any word in Portuguese, I spontaneously babbled some words in Italian. Luckily, there was a girl on that train who spoke Italian.
The doctors knocked some sense into me so I started to communicate again in Portuguese, but when the doctors from the emergency room started to quickly ask me a lot of details, I switched to English. And that made the entire process easy and smooth. Afterwards, I surprisingly found out that the assistant who was doing my blood analysis had immigrated to Portugal 3 years ago: she came from Romania. So I talked in Romanian with her and it felt nice.
I payed the bus driver in Portuguese. I talked to my parents in Romanian. I contacted my boyfriend and I told him what had happened in Italian. I started writing my graduation paper in French, after having read some articles in Spanish. And now I'm writing in English.
Today, no one is being stopped to think globally. People ask me in which language do I think. I answer them that I rarely think in Romanian, because it always depends on the situation. No one forces you to stay fixed in your inherited values, customs or ways of thinking for all your life. Of course, that doesn't mean that you have to renegate your original culture just because you want to change. What I do think is great nowadays is that we are given enough knowledge in order to better adapt to new environments, to prepare ourselves for this intercultural world.

6 comments:

  1. Fantastico!Sei stupenda!Pamela

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  2. aici deja s-a creat confuzie; e greu pentru cunoscuti sa mai tina minte in ce tara esti. te misti prea rapid!

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  3. With people like you we can finally rebuild the Babel Tower. Take care of you, polyglot person.

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  4. Sie haben nicht erwähnt die Deutsch Sprache.
    Warum?
    Sie studierte in Hamburg als auch.

    I'm not sure if what's written above is "politicaly correct"... :))

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  5. Pentru ca germana am studiat-o prea putin, nici 2 luni, ca sa pot scrie in germana...insa oricum nu era necesar sa imi vb cu "dvs" :D

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  6. Nikolas Spanoudakis30 May, 2010 09:41

    Ciao Raluca!

    Spero che adesso sia tutto a posto. Hai avuto un' avventura "bella"...

    Sono d' accordissimo con la tua conclusione. Per fortuna la nostra generazione ha l' accesso alla conoscenza fatto che ci permette di adattarsi a vari ambienti culturali.

    Grazie per il post. Ciaociao!

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