Growing up in India, I was taught British English and not American. So it was always a lift for me, never elevator and I always queued up for something, not line up. I definitely had to adopt some jargon when I came to the US for university, and so I was in fact looking forward to spending a year in the UK, where I’d not always end up with the wrong order when I order chips at the counter. I did not realize that the language differences extended much beyond just vocabulary, and was in for quite a surprise when I first moved to London.
I had my first shock at my first social event here in London. I was speaking with a bunch of British ‘lads’ and I could not understand a word of what they were saying, and it had nothing to do with their accents. They were throwing phrases one after the other and I was absolutely lost. To be honest, when I asked them to explain this slang to me, which they were very glad to do, I still could not understand what any of it meant. I learnt 2 things that day: 1) The British slangs are more regular to their language than ordinary words. 2) They love their slangs and so it’s always a good conversation starter to ask Britishers to explain their slangs, and you’ll definitely get one or two cultural references and opinions from them as they try explaining the phrases to you. I must say, tens of such conversations later, I’m definitely better at interpretation than I was on the first day, but nowhere close to being fluent at it.
Sometimes, I also completely forget the formalness with which they approach communication here. I had recently submitted an essay in which I used ‘math’ to refer to ‘mathematics’. I got my essay back with tens of red marks, all of them encircling the word ‘math’, for it being too informal and ‘American’. Then in class we were given strict instructions about how important it is for us to adopt a formal structure of language in all our essays, which is a lesson I probably should have learnt a long time ago, but which was nonetheless quite amusing.
I have come to enjoy the dynamics of all the languages, accents and accepted words as I spend time here. Of course, I experienced a lot of cultural diversity in Boston, what stood out for me in London was its diversity of languages. There’s a heavy concentration of the very diverse European population here, and since most of them are bilingual, they all have different approaches to speaking the same language. And the beauty of the fact that despite such different cultural and linguistic backgrounds addressing our speech, we all understand each other’s spoken English rather effortless, and that’s what makes diversity such a successful, as well as colo(u)rful phenomenon.
