When Pidgin Gets Confusing

If you’ve grown up in Colombo the chances of you being monolingual are very rare. Surrounded by at least two ethnic groups, you’re bound to pick up a language that isn’t your mother tongue.

I do realise I’m stating the obvious, but the thought of Sri Lankans being linguists struck me like a brick to the head the other day. I was trying to speak to someone in Sinhala, and as usual I was frantically searching my brain for words that I blurt awkwardly- punctuating my sentences inordinately with fullstops, exclamation marks and question marks- and being pleonastic about it to boot . And in the bungling gush I threw in a Tamil word!

This caught me by surprise because Tamil isn’t one of the languages I grew up around. I hope I pick up on the language, I can add it to my collection of garbled languages.

Garbled because, while it’s all good and well, when you’re as mixed in ethnicities as I am you tend to learn too many languages that you get very confused at times.

I had to learn about 5 languages at the age of six. This was something my little brain couldn’t handle (what with all the different rules of grammar, alphabets and pronunciation, how could you blame me?). If my brain were a bowl of cereal, the languages I’ve learnt are the Froot Loops. In order to speak a language I’d have to locate Loops of the same colour and string them together.

Here’s how confused I am– I can count up to 5 in Sinhala, only to trail off from 6 to 10 in Arabic. While speaking in French or Malay I inadvertently toss in a few Sinhala words. Or the reverse, like just the other day I was trying to say ‘key’ in Sinhala and ended up saying ‘konchi’ which means ‘key’ in Malay.

Not to mention for the past three days I’ve been ransacking my mind for the Sinhala word for ‘monkey’ but all that comes to me is ‘monyet’, the Malay word for it. I’m too stubborn to ask anyone what the word is, because I know that I KNOW the word for monkey in Sinhala and I’m determined to pick it out of the recess of my mind that it’s lurking in!

But I guess all in all, most Sri Lankan’s are lucky. Coming from this cultural mallum, we’re either bilingual or polyglots. Unless you’re grasp of languages is sketchy like mine which can leave you frustratingly helpless at times! To the point where you misplace your National Identity Card, get served wrong orders and generally never get what you ask for.