Communication
Posted By Sika on August 23, 2009
In Mozambique the official language is Portuguese. Very few people speak English, especially where I am, up north, ‘coz there isn’t much of a tourist trade up here. They also have Makua, N’Dau, and a few other local languages, none of which I speak. Oh wait, and there’s Chichewa, which I do speak, more or less. But that becomes useless about two hours past the border, and my first stop on my first day in Mozambique, was 3 hours past the border.
I got on a minibus using Chichewa to make myself understood, but when I got off no one understood a word I said. Even the driver had undergone a transformation that removed his ability to understand Chichewa during the three hour journey.
So that leaves me with Spanish. Which is beyond rusty, since the last time I used it was with a Spanish VSO volunteer to whom I explained my Spanish is virtually useless because I keep substituting just enough Spanish with Chichewa to make it entirely incomprehensible. But Spanish is all I got.
I wonder if there is a reason why the words and phrases why the words related to commerce and traveling are the most similar–it seems it would be useful to border people, at least, to keep those words similar. But it could also be that I don’t have enough Portuguese to find other similarities. The basic travel vocabulary is the easiest to use the age-old (ok, 5-day-old for me) technique of replacing ll with l or sh and changing words to end with ao (y’know, all the types of things that seem annoying and insulting when people do them to “change” English to Spanish). But they work for these basic things.
For actual Spaniards it’s easier. Many of the sh sounds come right where the lisp goes in Castillan Spanish. And, as has been pointed out to me, having a native understanding of Spanish makes it easier to understand and be understood when speaking “portunol”, which makes sense. After all, I donºt have a problem understanding English in most of its many variations, but my students had to relear bits of English any time they had a tutor with a different accent. I guess familiarity breeds flexibility in this case.
Of course different brains work differently, too. Enrique, a PCV who got back from Moz just before I left, said he had no problems understanding, but many problems being understood. I’m guessing his Spanish is much better than mine: I can usually make myself understood (probably because I have to stick to basic words) but understanding takes many repitions. But it works.
I liked being near the border best, though: Spanish and Chichewa are all entangled in the foreign language section of my brain and that’s the only place I didn’t have to worry which was coming out.
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