Blank Stares Abound

If you've been reading for a while, you know that I'm of the opinion that Georgian is hard to learn. Once you master the Elvish looking alphabet and its various sounds, which is really the easiest part to becoming proficient, you get to the bizarre structure of it [I say bizarre as it pertains to us English speakers]. Verbs have seemingly arbitrary stems which, depending on tense and person, you add different letters to. There are no articles and no prepositions because you tack these onto words in the form of infixes and suffixes, and in certain cases you even drop a few letters to make the word sound better. And if that's not enough, you're usually dealing with some throaty sounds that are absent completely in English conversation, as well as navigating dizzying consonant clusters that make you want to give up your first born for a freaking vowel to be thrown in.

It's a tricky language for even the most language savvy person, and Georgians know it. So foreigners are met with great enthusiasm and appreciation for even attempting to communicate in Georgian. But many times, if you try to say something you will be met with a blank stare. When you repeat yourself a few more times, you start to get more and more disheartened as confusion clouds the poor Georgian's face. Eventually, you will either start charading in hopes they'll understand, or just write out the word. You will inevitably get your point across, however, and they will say the word you wanted back to you and guess what - it will sound exactly the same as what you have been saying for the last five minutes.

Or at least to you it will.

I've been experiencing a lot of frustration in regards to communication over the last few weeks. Even with my coteachers, who supposedly speak English, I have to phrase things very simply so they will understand. I'm a [fairly] decent and eloquent writer when I want to be, and can construct pretty complex sentences in English. We'll count that as a side effect of speaking it for the last 26 years. So being plunged into a place where hardly anyone knows my language, let alone speaks above a certain elementary proficiency, has been a bit taxing. Which is fine! It's what I expected! It's just been strange to be on the minority side for once.

And that's exactly what I am - a minority. Being a Caucasian English speaking female has never before put me in this category, but in this part of the world that's totally what I am.

The upside to not being able to exercise my native language so much is that I'm picking up Georgian really quickly. I'm able to read at a fairly decent pace, and even in class I'm able to understand more and more what my coteachers are saying to the students. It's a good feeling, finally being able to frame and pick out small parts of what is happening around me. Of course, this good feeling goes away almost the second I try saying something in Georgian and everyone looks at me like I was prattling on in Chinese.

My friend and I were having a chat last night about our inability to communicate with people around us when she said something that has made everything else finally fall into place - Georgians aren't used to hearing non-Georgians speak Georgian.

Duh.

I mean, it's so simple.

As English speakers I think we really take for granted just how global our language is. It is dominant on two continents and one very large island, and that's only native speakers. We won't take into account the various other parts of the world where it's taught from an early age so that children are fluent by the time they're ten years old. We're used to hearing familiar words sound different due to the accents and influences of other languages. Australians and Brits are different from me, but I still know what they're saying [most of the time]. I've grown up hearing the various regional dialects present in America, so just because someone has a drawl doesn't mean I can't have a conversation with them. Accents have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.

I'm aware that I sound borderline ridiculous when I pronounce Georgian words, and I've accepted that for a while I will have a pretty bad American accent with it no matter how hard I try. Given the people I regularly speak English with here have similarly thick Georgian accents with English, I figure they've likewise accepted my crazily affected speech. And accept, yes. But that is not the same as understand.

Georgia has only recently had a steady influx of foreigners. Up until a few years ago, most people that spoke Georgian were actual Georgians, with the random Russian or Turk thrown in for good measure. This is not a large country, and aside from a couple secluded communities in the Greater Caucasus mountains who speak a different form of Georgian (think of the difference between French and Quebequois and you have the difference between Georgian and Mingrelian), there isn't really much regional variety in how people sound. External entertainment, like music and movies, is either dubbed in Russian or Georgian, with a few songs making it here in English. But you're still dealing with a group of people who, for the most part, never had to deal with obvious accents in their own language. And when you've never encountered different pronunciations of familiar words, odds are you will have a hard time figuring out what is being said.

It's strange to be an outsider. I refuse to say that I understand completely what Spanish speaking immigrants are currently going through in America, because that's just an outrageous claim, but I do sympathize a lot more with them. It's hard to be somewhere and not possess the ability to communicate your most basic needs. I'm very lucky here, as I've an incredibly supportive host family who patiently tries to help me navigate through their crazy phonics, as well as teachers who give me any resources I could possibly want for learning Georgian. I'm also lucky enough to know how to read, which is a pretty big game changer. So I'm off to a way better start than most immigrants in America, and I'm still incredibly frustrated by it. In fact, I've almost every single advantage I could possibly want when learning a foreign language, and by the end of most encounters I'm exhausted and feel like going to sleep for twelve hours to give my brain a rest.

It would be awesome if Americans could adopt the attitude that Georgians have to outsiders. Most signs here are in Georgian, English, and Russian. All of the ATM's and street pay boxes have multiple language options, with English always being one. Every single restaurant I've gone into has an English menu - even ones in tiny villages. And even though they can't seem to understand a freaking word I say other than "hello," "thank you," and "goodbye," you can bet your ass that every Georgian I've met gets incredibly smiley when they see me trying. I've never had so much encouragement for such blatant linguistic slaughter. Juxtapose this with many people stateside, who hate the fact that we have billboards in Spanish in predominately Latino neighborhoods. Or even my personal favorite, the folks who get irate when they have to "Push 1 for English" when calling a hotline.

Leaving your home country, and entering into a minority, is tough. It's hard even when you're educated and have resources, because you will be very different for a while. It's even more difficult when you don't have the tools to learn on your own, and you're forced to pick up the language through interaction. When you're met with hostility and general annoyance, you're going to feel self conscious and not want to try speaking their language. Instead, you will find other people who speak your language, and create self sustaining spheres inside the larger community and never fully integrate. Immigrants in America don't know English for a lot of reasons, and being lazy certainly is not one of them. They don't know because our whole cultural apparatus - schools, public buildings, signs, television, even the testing system for higher education - is biased towards the English language, and is completely bilingually unfriendly. As a whole society, Americans are fairly cold when it comes to helping foreigners on our turf. We've this strange sense of entitlement, like if you're going to live in our country you better learn the language before coming here, and if you don't then clearly you're just lazy and rude, when there are actually much larger forces in play that make this a completely unrealistic expectation.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: 
Next time you're frustrated by the cashier whose English is heavily accented, just imagine it's me trying my hardest to practice your crazy ass contradictory language in some vain attempt to fit into where I'm living. Cut people trying to learn English some slack, because for as wild as Georgian is, I'm pretty god damn happy that English is my first language.