Succumbing to the Language of the Street

By the time we had gotten to our third country---Sweden---I had realized that accumulating a library of images of "vocabulary in the wild" for the various languages we encountered was to be my primary sparetime activity during our trip. It was something that I joyfully embraced. It felt new each time I went out. I always had energy for it. Soon it became an obsession.

Even as we approached the first train station in Sweden, crossing the bridge to Malmö, I was priming myself for the task ahead, one that I knew would begin the minute we stepped out of the (Danish) train car on to the platform at our destination.

In what would be a preview of many such scenes on our trip, Red had to linger on the platform with our bags while I zipped around hastily through the crowd, gathering Swedish vocabulary and phrases from the signs on the posts and hanging above the tracks, all while the people were still there.

I already knew to take advantage of each place right then and there. It was easy to fool myself that I would "come back later." Get it while you can, became my motto.

In Denmark, I had started with the idea that by taking these images of "language on the street," I could harvest a basic set of the words and phrases of the Danish language, such as one would learn in a basic language course. I soon realized, however, that the public printed and written vocabulary was very different. There were so many "basic" words, ones that one would find in a phrasebook, for example, that were very hard to find in print in public. Likewise there were words that one would find over and over in print on signs, but which would rarely come up in spoken conversation, and which might seem exotically out of place in a basic language course. Nevertheless such words were everywhere in written form.

At first this lack of overlap dismayed me, but I soon shook it off with the idea that I would "go with whatever was there."  The readable "language of the street" was its own thing worthy of documentation for its own sake, I concluded. By itself, it would make for a powerful way to learn a language.

Being an introvert as I am, I realized as well that this approach was perfectly in line with the way I learn languages. Even in a place like Sweden, where everyone seems to want to practice English with you (making it hard to carry on with even the most basic conversational interactions in Swedish sometimes), one still sees the written local language everywhere one goes, just by going out in public and walking down the street (my favorite activity while traveling abroad).

The public vocabulary available to one's eyes is a constant shifting text (to borrow a word from critical theory) that makes for the most superb and intimate feeling of immersion in the language.