(Post 258 of 263)<\/p>\n
It’s interesting how multilingualism works, at least in my brain.<\/p>\n
In Mexico, I live in a Spanish environment. Every year, I get more proficient, but I’ve finally accepted that even with my accent, even with my mistakes, I’m fluent and capable of handling any situation in my third language. For speaking, it is now my default language and I’m surprised to catch myself thinking and dreaming it.<\/p>\n
Within that Spanish environment, I work in English day in and day out, listening and reading and writing, but I actually don’t speak it that much. When I do, sometimes my qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois accent pops out and I often search for words or put in a Spanish word.<\/p>\n
Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois continues to be my default language of emotion and what I use when I talk to myself. I read a lot of qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois content, but it’s very hard to get TV shows and movies out of Quebec (one of life’s great ironies), so my spoken qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois can have a lot errors and hesitation and mispronunciations, even though it is in theory my langue maternelle.<\/p>\n
From the time I got to Calgary to landing in Montreal, I was firmly in English territory, and it didn’t feel as strange as I expected. I did catch myself a few times fumbling for a word, but it really all felt very natural. I lived most of my life in a primarily English environment out of the home before moving to Mexico, so of course I fell back into that rhythm very easily.<\/p>\n
But when I got to the Quebec…oh, it was like slipping into comfortable slippers after an eternity in uncomfortable shoes. I was shocked. My mother did take me to task repeatedly for my mistakes when I spoke, but that’s just her being her and not getting how hard it is to get qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois content out of the province and as well that she’s the reason I speak two other languages! When I was interacting with others, it felt easy and comfortable. Home is always going to be home, even if there are a million reasons it makes sense to be away.<\/p>\n
One very amusing thing that happened linguistically when I was in Quebec was that I answered my doorbell in Mexico! I was in the car with my parents when it happened and I recognised the fellow on the camera as being a guy who sells good quality black earth. I’ve been trying to get ahold of him for ages. So I switched from qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois to Spanish mode to answer to tell him I wasn’t home but he’d have a sale if he could come back the following week. We chatted for a couple of minutes so he’d know what I needed and when I could receive the order, then hung up. Later, my mother commented that she couldn’t understand a word of the conversation but that it sounded very fluid to her. I think this was the moment she realised that all that money she spent on my private classes when I was a kid had finally paid off!<\/p>\n
(He did come back the following weekend, and with perfect timing as my giant front yard cactus had keeled over from its own weight. So I got him to trim it and clear away the debris.)<\/p>\n
Answering the doorbell while on the go reminds me that I need to talk about the change in using your Amigo Sin Limites (formerly Sin Fronteras) plan outside of Mexico.<\/p>\n
But a final word on this topic, going back to Spanish mode when I got to the Aerom\u00e9xico counter at YUL felt just as natural as stepping back into using qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois in a business setting. I expected to need a period to adapt, but it was a smooth transition. I guess I really am trilingual now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Post 258 of 263) It’s interesting how multilingualism works, at least in my brain. In Mexico, I live in a Spanish environment. Every year, I get more proficient, but I’ve finally accepted that even with my accent, even with my mistakes, I’m fluent and capable of handling any situation in my third language. For speaking, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[632,895],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-canada","category-merida"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43556"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43561,"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43556\/revisions\/43561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}