Englandic

When I moved to Abu Dhabi I was 9 years old. I had never travelled anywhere outside Europe, and had a mix of an Icelandic and American accent. It was 2010 and my father had already lived here for a year. I’d only visited him once during that time. While there for three weeks, I visited this school called “Raha International School”. This was the school I was going to spend the next three years (unbeknownst to me, that number would triple).

Before I moved to Abu Dhabi, I took some English classes with a tutor in order to be prepared for the fourth grade in an English speaking, international school. I really liked my tutor, she was super nice and taught very well. What I always found funny was that she would speak Icelandic with a thick American accent, while I would speak English with what I thought was an American accent, but my friends have since told me that I had a very strong Icelandic accent. She would ask me questions like: “How do you like the weather in Iceland?”, and I’d say “Well to be honest, I do like cold weather, but am excited to get some heat in Abu Dhabi”. Except it wouldn’t sound anything like what you are imagining when reading this. In reality, it was more like “Welll too bee honest, a-ee doo laeek coldd whether, but amm excitet to gett som heet in Abu Dhabi.”

My first year at Raha finally came, and my Icelandic thoughts came with. I noticed that when I would listen to my teachers in English, I would translate it to Icelandic in my mind. “This project is due on the 29^th of October,” became “Þetta verkefni þarf að ver búið 29unda október.” In Icelandic we have a phrase “Þú veist”, meaning “you know”. We use this like how English speakers use the word “like”, in between thoughts. So, I would often catch myself saying “you know” when speaking in English, because I was essentially translating directly from Icelandic. My friend Alec would love to point this out saying “No, we don’t know”, which I found incredibly annoying. I also would sometimes say things in Icelandic to my friends, not even noticing, until they pointed it out to me. We would be talking about football, and out of nowhere I’d blurt out “Já, Fernando Torres er frábær leikmaður. Hann er eiginlega uppáhalds leikmaðurinn minn.” I actually still do this from time to time.

Once I had lived in Abu Dhabi for a year or two, my accent had completely changed from Icelandic to a typical American accent. It was in this period that I would say I hit my peak of bilingualism, for my age at least. I would very rarely ask my parents or whoever I was talking to what the Icelandic word for something was. This was also when I was reading a lot more, so I was always able to keep my Icelandic. My language teachers at Raha have always told me “If you don’t use it, you lose it,” and I never really took it seriously, since at the time I was very solid in both languages, but I would regret this. As I got older, and the curriculum became more rigorous, I started to forget a lot of Icelandic. Hell, I don’t even know what rigorous means in Icelandic. Usually when you get older, your spoken language becomes a lot more sophisticated. But, for bi-lingualists the price for developing one language is the death of the other. So, one day when I have finished my studies, I hope that I can start to develop and balance out my Icelandic and English. Otherwise I´ll end up speaking English at a university level, and Icelandic at a third grade level.