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“Fala Fwancais?”

By Riana Lagarde

I always forget that I am in a country where I have to speak another language. It is that first initial shock each day. When I walk out the door, I barely have time to remember what tongue to speak in.  Within seconds, I pass my neighbour and say my first “bonjour, Monsieur” of the morning.  When it comes out my mouth, I hear my horrible butchering of the French language (like a chainsaw hitting pavement).  My accent is more than just an American living in France for 3 years. It goes deeper than that, much deeper. Back to 1st  grade and life in Idaho on a “wanch with wabbits.”

 

I couldn’t say my R’s. I couldn’t even say my own name correctly. Perhaps my parents thought is was cute “the wabbit wan down the woad” that I spoke like Elmer Fudd or that maybe ‘Wiana would gwow out of it”.  After a year of speech therapy classes at the University of Idaho and plenty of bribing me with candy bars, I was fixed, sort of.  Can you imagine the scientific journal article for that one: Speech Impediments cured by Pavlov’s law.  Afterwards, we moved and at my new school in a new state, the kids tormented me because of my accent. “I am fwom  Moscow”, I told them --Russia, they thought.  I had also climbed into some poison ivy the week before and was covered with scabs, so I let them think that I was a weirdo from the USSR.  To this day, people still ask which state I am from.

 

 

As you can imagine, learning R’s was traumatic and having to learn French R’s (completely different—like you are hacking up a loogie in your throat). But wait there’s more. I took a French class when I was in high school. Why, don’t I speak perfect French then? Well, my teacher was French Canadian, and if you have ever heard their accent then you know why, I wasn’t really speaking French after all. I did learn to conjugate verbs and some of the grammar basics, but really not how to feel comfortable saying anything out loud besides ‘Allez Canucks’.

 

 

In addition to all this mess, I lived in Portugal for a short time a few years ago and learned Portuguese which was perfect for me—the R’s are silent! And it’s a nasal language; ideal, because of my deviated septum that makes me always sound like I am talking out of my nose or under water.

 

 

And one more thing. My husband is from the south of France, do you know the twang of Midi? The southern accent of the Soleil? It sounds like a bell is following you around, striking at the end of each word that has an N. “Je cherche le pain-g dans le martin-g.” This is the French that I am learning at home, via my husband and his Occitan speaking family (a language very similar to Portuguese and Latin).

 

 

If you ever meet me and hear me attempting to massacre the  French language, you invariably will ask me: what state I am from, if I play pétanque-the typically southern game of boules, and why my parents named me “Wiana?” And I might inadvertently respond, “que pena” instead of “quelle dommage.”