Missionary English

After so many years on the mission field, we have stopped talking normally. At first, we secretly laughed at some of the awkward usage of veteran missionaries. Their English was "funny". Some of the vocabulary seemed unnatural and the accent was something between generic American mid-west and slight British with whatever influence of the country of current residence as well as traces of their own roots.

Now, we've slipped into a middle funny foreign sounding English of our own. I've watched and listened to myself over the years and I'm not really proud of the accent I've acquired. I don't talk like the Indiana girl I was born to be... nor like the Pensacola transplant I became... nor like the Marianna resident I might have been during my teaching years in the panhandle of Florida. I don't sound like my Zimbabwean friends. I don't sound like my children's South African teachers . I don't sound like my American friends from Georgia or Oregon who live in Tete.

I've picked up using words like rubber for erasure and a stop for a period. I call it a bin instead of a trash can. We have bits of things instead of pieces. We have a garden instead of a yard. Those are the English words that have changed in our vocabulary. There are also Mozambican words we've adopted... some of them are Portuguese and some are Nyungwe and some are, ... uh, not. A chapa is a minibus or a zinc roofing sheet. (Interestingly, this comes up in conversation several times a day.) A grade (GRAH-day) is iron bar-work on a house for security. We eat muliwo because I just can't bring myself to call the leaves "rape". We say sensa short for the Portuguese com licenca, meaning "excuse me" or asking permission to enter (knocking just isn't done) or to pass by. We wear capulanas and chinelos. We eat massa or ntsima... our Zim friends call it sadza and our SA friends call it pap. In America, many of these things just don't exist... so we never had a word for them before we came here.

So, with a talent for approximating accents and speech styles comes a sort of identity crisis of my own dialect.When I come home, excuse my English. It has been globalized. I am better understood around the world for adopting vocabulary that is a little less American at times. Just remind me of the "right" word for your part of the world. I'll pick it up and be talking more like you in no time. I hope.