Earlier I was talking about the perfect English as spoken by Alfons. Over at kottke there’s a thread about bilangual conversations in which I mention the near-perfect institutionalized English of the Dutch people.
It reminds me of a phone call from a relative a couple years ago. I remember handing the phone over to my twin who afterwards handed it back to me. The relative noticed that we were obviously twins (we sounded alike) but unconsiously complimented me when he said that he recognized me by voice just because of the way we used to talk. ‘You’ve gotten used to speaking English’.
The funny thing about the English I speak is that it is clearly adopted from the language that is spoken in my social environment. I speak my wife’s words, the relatives, the friends’ and all those others that appear and go in my foreign life. Unconsciously, I’ve adopted the Nova Scotian way of talking, marking the start of the integration process. For the good, I hope.
So basically, I’ve just been parroting my wife’s English which is the basic clue of learning languages. Namely, as toddlers, we all parrot our mom and dad to master the intricaties of spoken word. The logical next step is writing. And for some kind of reason, I think I should pick up a real English course over here just to refresh what I’ve been taught overseas.