A Brit walks into a bar in Madrid. A bartender approaches him and unleashes a torrent of rapid-fire words.
‘Sorry, I don’t understand,’ the Brit holds up his hands, an apologetic gesture.
The bartender shrugs and walks away. They’re replaced by a second bartender who also unleashes a stream of words which blend into each other.
‘I’m really sorry,’ the Brit whimpers. ‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’
The bartender huffs loudly and retreats. A third takes their place. This one speaks more slowly, annunciating each word.
‘Nope,’ the Brit shakes his head. ‘Means nothing.’
A man with an air of authority saunters over. ‘You didn’t understand any of them?’ he asks in English.
The Brit shakes his head again.
‘But I sent you someone from Galicia, then a woman from Santiago in Chile, and finally a university graduate from Madrid.’
‘What can I say,’ the Brit shrugs. ‘It all just sounds like Spanish to me, and I don’t speak Spanish.’
A friend recently asked if I ever had any problems with people understanding my accent in other countries. The only country I’ve ever experienced issues with people who can speak English struggling to understand me is England. To be fair, that was many years ago when I first moved from the Isle of Bute to Stockport as a young man and spoke a hell of a lot faster than I do now. But still, it’s illuminating. The most ridiculous example was asking for a packet of Benson & Hedges cigarettes and being handed a can of Coke.
Perceptions are funny things. I knew I spoke with a distinct Scottish accent. Unless anyone in Britain speaks with an RP accent, the words from their mouth will generally betray where they come from. Yet, a girl I worked with in Stockport was shocked when I pointed out her accent sounded as unfamiliar to my ears as mine did to hers. She was shocked because she didn’t think she had an accent … in Stockport! That, and a few other incidents, made me realise I wasn’t quite as much a country hick as I thought.
The first time the question of whether non-Brits can differentiate between British accents occurred was in Jamaica, during a conversation with a patois-speaking Rastafarian. I was with Andy and our friend Jo, both Stopfordians. When we asked the Rasta in question whether he could differentiate between the way we spoke, he replied that all three of us sounded the same to his ears.
Whenever I tell this story to friends in England, some struggle to believe it.
Through the ears of others
Living in other countries helped me understand that Rastafarian’s point of view. Before we moved to the Canary Islands, we spent a year learning Spanish at the Cervantes Institute in Manchester. Our Spanish tutors taught us Castilian Spanish. The first time Andy ordered a ‘Therbetha’ (cerveza) at a bar on Tenerife, the Canarian waitress responded with a nasally ‘Que?’
There were two lessons we quickly learned after this. The first was, Canarian Spanish is more aligned with South American Spanish than Castilian. The second is, there are some Canarios who pretend to not understand the language spoken by their fellow countryfolk from the mainland, which is nonsense. It would be like someone from London who speaks with an RP accent walking into a bar in Glasgow and the bartender saying ‘Sorry, mate, don’t understand a word.’
Maybe it’s just payback for Canarian presenters on national Spanish TV having subtitles accompany their words.
Our neighbour, Jesús, was from the Basque Country. When his sister visited, she told us she struggled to understand what Canarios were saying to her. Basically, having listened to Canarian Spanish for years, we could understand the locals better than this native Spanish speaker.
The point of this is, where someone who spoke Spanish could identify different regional accents in a conversation between someone from Madrid and, say, someone from La Gomera, the chances are that all anyone who couldn’t speak the language would hear was two people speaking Spanish. Whenever I travel to a country where I don’t speak the language, I certainly can’t tune into regional accents. And it’s often the same when applied to non-English speakers and Britain. Here’s a final example.
The owner of a restaurant in Palmela in Portugal, having spent some time in Britain, told us he could detect a difference between my accent and Andy’s. ‘Are you a Cockney?’ he asked me.
