Lots of us speak languages that are almost impenetrable to the general populace, and yet they aren’t properly foreign languages. For example, if you work in IT, a medical profession, maybe construction, or a trade, you can rapidly get into the area of the incomprehensible when you talk to someone you work with. Your spouse or friend standing by may look on with puzzlement as you get deep into terminology that they can’t understand.
The two that I have been relatively fluent in are Surgery speak ( a dialect of Medical Speak) and Anthropologese ( spoken only by the obscure tribal members of the anthropological community). It’s amazing how you can be strangers one moment and members of a sort of community the next when people start exchanging bits of coded talk that only insiders will react to. It’s like having the passwords to the clubhouse.
Doubt me? I was downtown, where I live, the other day, and looking for a specific business. My search was not fruitful. Evenrtually I grew frustrated and I went into an office and asked them if they knew where it was. By chance, I wandered into the office of a surgical practice. They generously offered to look up what I was looking for, and a conversation started. Somewhere in that conversation, I mentioned the years I spent in the operating room scrubbing on exactly the sort of cases their practice specialized in. For those of us OR types it’s always fun to compare where things are versus were they were in the stone age ( a year or two prior). Hearing the conversation one of the docs stuck her head out of her office, and said ” Hey, are you looking for a job?’ We all laughed and got on with the conversation.
Yes, I eventually got where I was going, but in the meantime, I had a good time talking with ” my sort of people.” It was a great compensation for being lost looking for something that turned out to be across the street.
Well, this may not help with your desire to learn Gaelic, Catalan, Afghan, French, or Spanish. But consider if you will the special use, or restricted circumstance, languages that you do speak.
Discover more from Louis N. Carreras, Woodcarver
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I speak fluent Swiss German dialect after living here for almost 60 years, but not a language you hear outside of Switzerland. I am proboably one of the few English speakers that know the laanguage.
I think this is what really speaking a language is! I really enjoyed reading this and this piece made me think of my own language!
Perfect.
Glad you like it, Kajal.
I don’t speak any work dialects, obviously, since my work was teaching English. The focus was on how to use the language to accomplish goals. But that is exactly where these dialects become useful through time. We’re tribal entities and what I taught was just basic competence in communication — and no one ever masters that.
One of the joys of language is that it is always growing and changing. Which makes its study, from your perspective, or from mine as an anthropologist, so interesting.
Absolutely!!!
I speak another dialect of Medical…Insurance-ese. If you know the difference between “denial code” and “remark code,” you know the evils of which I speak.
That wasn’t any of my dialects. But you pointed out another important dialect!