WMD: In more timely fashion, here's my latest Courier column the day it's actually published. You can catch the direct link here. As usual, I'm reproducing the text below:
A note: writing about culture, language or ethnicity in a popular format is always chancy. You run the risk of either being accused of racism or receiving altogether too enthusiastic accolades from people who are indeed racist. But either you try to describe current social reality, however breezily, or you give up and just make stuff up to attract readers. I hope I'm doing the former.
Barry Link, Vancouver Courier
Published: Wednesday, September 26, 2007The other week one of our reporters asked me to listen to an interview she had just taped. She had talked to a source on the phone for five minutes and barely understood anything he had said. I listened carefully. The man had an exceptionally heavy accent, and I barely understood any of it either.
Vancouver, I have no idea what you're saying anymore. We've become, within a decade, Babel on the Pacific. With a dozen different major languages in currency, and widely varying abilities at English in play, communication on our streets is becoming a tad difficult. At the risk of paraphrasing Dennis Miller, I don't want to go on a rant here, but it's also starting to suck.
Admittedly, it's one of the prices of going global. People are coming to Vancouver from all over the world, and that's fine because we have far better restaurants now.
The variety of skin tones at the beach are also quite nice. And our new global self has created the Great Vancouver Pastime, which is to guess where everyone living here is from. As it turns out, everywhere but here: The latest census figures reveal that only six people in Vancouver are actually from Vancouver. (There was a seventh, but he sold his West End studio, moved to Saskatoon and bought a neighbourhood.)
A multiplicity of languages does make for adventurous living. When I rented a few years back, one of my building's maintenance men was Russian. He was very nice and helpful, and I would talk with him occasionally, which was interesting because he sort of spoke English, and sort of did not. If he showed up at my door with a tool box, I knew he was there to fix something.
Such adventure is now on the increase. When I take a taxi, often the driver sort of speaks English, and sort of does not. I tell him where I want to go, he sort of drives me there, and I sort of get there. And then by looking at the numbers on the meter, I know how much to pay, sort of.
At a cafe near where I live, one of the servers sort of speaks English, and sort of does not. If I order coffee, she understands what I want. But if I order tea, I have to point to the actual box on the counter display so she understands what I mean.
I have the same problem when shopping. At a Canadian Tire this past summer, I was helped by a clerk with an Asian accent so thick he finally--and graciously--wrote down what he was trying to tell me. The person next in line to me also helpfully pitched in as a translator. Between the three of us, we got to the bottom of my problem, which was that Canadian Tire did not have the automotive light bulb I was looking for. Good thing it only took 15 minutes to find out.
Ask around, and you'll find people with similar tales, whether it's buying an iPod at an electronics retailer, calling up a grocery store, or ordering new flooring.
I'm sympathetic to everyone involved, whether they speak English or not, since we're all in the same rocky multilingual boat. It also makes me wish, yet again, that life was like TV or the movies. That is, when someone speaks a language I don't understand, or mauls English so completely that they might as well be speaking a rare Tibetan dialect used only by a dozen monks high up in the mountains, that subtitles would flash in front of our eyes to explain what people are saying.
I could use subtitles while at the mall. I've noticed two things about retail in an economy with a labour shortage. With so many workers going into construction or resource work, the B listers are filling the store jobs. Many of them, especially the younger ones, regard customer service as a contagious disease. Others speak English so hesitantly you're better off using sign language. Or switching to written notes, like that Canadian Tire clerk. The other alternative is for me to take my business elsewhere, and if that starts happening on a wider scale among Vancouverites, business is in trouble.
Is anyone to blame? The provincial government has cut back on ESL funding. The federal government, which sets immigration policy, largely washes its hands of settlement issues when it comes to language training. That leaves local municipalities, schools and community centres and heroic little non-profits to take up the slack, and they have more goodwill than resources.
Languages, accents, and varying ability at English do create a kind of urban music. But that's as long as everyone can follow the chorus. Increasingly, I fear, we're singing different tunes.
I learned what it is like not to be able to speak the native language when I lived in Denmark a decade ago. It gave me a certain sympathy for non-English speakers in North America.
Posted by: Mr Squid | October 02, 2007 at 06:01 PM