Aside from having the privilege of being exposed to different languages spoken by people I met growing up in Sunshine West (and learning my mother tongue, Greek, as a second language) I also came to learn Westlish, understood and spoken by the residents of the western suburbs. By this, I mean the miscommunications among bilinguals (and possibly multilinguals) of the West. And for their unintentional (and amusing) gaffes, I learned what you may think are fancy-pants linguistic terms. Here are some examples that had me all ears.
Did you know that Sunshine has been renamed by its older Greek speaking residents? They will tell you they live in ‘Sunsine’; substituting the middle ‘sh’ sound with the ‘s’ sound. Why so? The ‘sh’ sound does not exist in the repertoire of speech sounds of the Greek language. The same goes for the ‘ch’ speech sound, as in chicken.
If you ever stepped foot into a Fish ‘n’ Chip shop owned by a Greek family back in the day, you would have been handed your parcel of yesterday’s newspaper with, ‘Here you(r) fis an’ tsips,’ and an extra potato cake to devour.
During my tertiary studies in speech pathology, I discovered that speech sounds of a language are termed phonemes. And when a preschool child learns to talk like an adult, they may pronounce a word, sounding like an elderly Greek-speaking resident (e.g. saying, ‘sop’ for shop) but their mispronunciation, termed palatal fronting, (pretty fancy-pants lingo huh?) is typically outgrown with or without speech therapy.
Greeks probably won’t change their word pronunciation much to the dismay of their embarrassed Aussie-born children, and so perhaps Westlish, or Greeklish(!), could become an official dialect of English. Oh, and if you speak the Cypriot Greek language, you live in ‘Shunshine.’ Maybe Sunshine should have kept its former name, Braybrook Junction. Hang on. ‘Braybrook Juncson’ would not suffice either among the Greek elders. [Head slap]
A customer approaches my late-uncle, Paul (Apostolis) in the little hardware shop my family runs in Sunshine West. He asks for “a packet of carrot seeds”. My uncle responds, “No packet. You have to bring a[n] empty metal container.” Perplexed, the customer questions, “Carrot seeds in a metal container?” Paul insists that a paper packet will leak. Both customer and shop assistant are puzzled. Paul leads the customer to the tank of ‘kerosene’. Knowing smiles rise on their faces when the customer slowly says, “I want ca-rrot seeds.” (Say ‘kerosene’ and ‘carrot seeds’ interchangeably at a quick pace!). What did I learn? My uncle’s misinterpretation led him to substitute words that sound similar to another word to make some kind of sense. This is called a mondegreen. You may have experienced this when making up your own lyrics for part of a song you cannot hear clearly.
My parents recall a customer of the Vietnamese-speaking community who was quite an open book. When marital status became the topic of conversation (my parents were and still are sticky noses!), the customer told them something along the lines of, “I cancel my wife. She live upstairs. I live downstairs.” As it turned out, they were divorced but sharing their residence. For someone who probably had no formal education in English, he turned out a scholarly metaphor using what I considered colourful language to tell of an unfortunate end to his marriage. I imagined him holding a giant red rubber stamp and pressing it down on his wife who was a cheque (CANCELLED). Quite fitting given the costs of ending some marriages.
Next time you question the language competence of someone whose first language is not English, you may just learn about the phenomena of (the English) language from them more than they do from you. And there is nothing more sophisticated than communicating in Westlish. Or is it ‘Westlis’? However it is pronounced, it is probably all Greek to you but worthy of ending here with an idiom.
