Belated December meme: Me and the English language

[luzula]

desireearmfeldt asked: "How did you come to end up in English-language/American-media-centric fandom?"

I've already talked about my fannish history in general elsewhere, so I'm choosing to focus on the word "English" here.

I am Swedish, but my family lived in the US for two years when my dad did his post-doc (in Seattle). I was nine and ten years old then, and soaked up the language like a sponge. When I came back, I got to go to the English classes for native speakers rather than the ones for people learning it as a second language (in Sweden, everyone has the right to have some classes in their native language, whatever it is).

Not that this made much difference--I already read a lot of books in English anyway. And Swedish, of course. I was a total bookworm, obviously. But I think it was my voracious reading that kept me from forgetting the language when I got home. I still have more of a relationship with English-as-written-language than as spoken, I think (although I do speak it well, though with a slight accent). But English has wormed its way into my brain to the extent that when I kept a diary in high school, I kept it in English. And I often think in English, too. Sometimes those lines between the languages are hard to cross--like, I'll know and feel perfectly well what a word or phrase means in one language, but can't find the equivalent words in the other. But I'm getting better at that--I'm doing some Swedish-to-English translation work for my environmental organization, and it's a lot of fun.

I've never been inspired to write fiction in Swedish. Not that I've really tried, I guess? I've done some translations of fairy tale fics, and that's been fun. A funny thing is that I'm pretty sure I'd find reading/writing porn in Swedish kind of weird? Part of that is getting used to words, I guess--I mean, "cock" seems like a perfectly natural word to me in English because I'm used to it, but finding the right word in Swedish is just...awkward. They all seem clinical, or childish, or too coarse, or whatever. I'm sure if I practiced it in Swedish I'd get better at it (I guess you can infer from this that I don't do dirty talk in bed *g*).

But another thing is that when things are close to you, it's harder to read/write fic about them. Kind of like when people don't write sex from the POV of their own gender because it feels too close to you. That's the reaction I had when I stumbled across a Swedish character in an RPF fic once. I was all "ewww, that is too close to me, I don't want to read it!" Which is kind of ridiculous because Americans write RPF about Americans all the time.

Okay, I hope you have enjoyed these rambling thoughts about me and the English language. : )

Comments

[luzula]

I'm glad you enjoyed the post! It was interesting to think this stuff through.