The BBB campaigns in various languages, dialects and sociolects, I read, such as Frisian, Papiamentu, Low Saxon, among others. For fun, this also includes The Hague: “Having the same identity and the same language is essential to understand each other,” states the summary of the election manifesto.
I sat there staring at that sentence for a while. What does BBB mean by that? That sentence seems to contradict itself when translated into different languages.
Will we continue to be understandable to each other in Turkish, Limburgish, Frisian? Or is it actually important to speak the same language? ‘Having’ the same language and even ‘the same identity’ seems to me to be asking quite a lot, mastering a common language should be sufficient.
Or is it not?
In The green it became winning essay of the Anil Ramdas Essay Competition published. Author, poet and radio producer Hamed A. Nadoshan, who grew up in Iran and has lived in the Netherlands since 2018, writes about the difficulty it takes him to find a place in Dutch society. His ‘inner world’ is, as he writes, secular and open (he talks about his ‘inner Tintin’), he has never felt specifically connected to Iran, except for his mother tongue.
He developed broadly: “In my younger years I had read Spinoza, I was familiar with the paintings of Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Mondriaan, even my favorite football team in Europe was the Orange with its exceptional stars of the time: Van Basten, Koeman and Gullit . I now thought that I had arrived at a place that would be completely in harmony with my inner world.”
But that’s not the case, and that’s all in the language. Of course Nadoshan learned Dutch, which is mandatory and he really wanted to.
He calls the level of language education he received low; when you read his essay you think that it is either not too bad or that he is quite linguistically gifted.
Only: we don’t hear it, we read it. And, he writes, the emphasis in determining whether someone belongs has shifted from skin color and appearance, to language and accent.
And yes, to be honest, I recognize that. That is to say, I recognize the enormous attention to accent and pronunciation. That someone from Amsterdam-West sounds differently Amsterdam than someone from the Jordaan, that you can hear things like that, yes that’s nice. And so you also hear that someone has a ‘non-Dutch’ accent and you try to identify it.
But that says nothing, or at least I always thought, about your sense of kinship or the level of communication. Someone can say things without an accent that immediately alienate you, and use an accent to express something to which you feel related.
But now I fear that you immediately assume a world of mutual incomprehension, especially on the basis of a non-European accent.
When I hear a heavy accent, I don’t think of Van Gogh or Spinoza. Well, otherwise not all the time.
Nadoshan notices that, even though people can ‘understand’ him, he immediately falls into the category of ‘immigrant’, or outsider, because of his more difficult-sounding language. So that ‘identitèt’, which we make up based on someone’s accent. Hmm.
Yet our identities do not have to be the same. We just need to suspend our judgments for a moment. Difficult enough.