mid-atlantic franglais

As an American, my default language is US English. That said, in the past couple of years, I’ve had problems sticking to it faithfully. I’m fluent in French and speak French with the roommate 90%-95% of the time. When I speak to her in English, she usuallyresponds in French (even though she speaks English). At work, the official working language is English, but I tend to go back and forth with my French colleagues. To confuse the situation even more, I work in the European HQ of an international company. Even though the global HQ is in the US, I write/edit marketing materials in UK English. The result is that my emails, IM messages and speech are often a mish-mash of US English, UK English and French. The boyfriend laughs when I do it and most of the time I don’t notice until he points it out. I told him that living in France has resulted in me becoming no-lingual instead of bilingual. I’m taking Spanish and so far it hasn’t crept into my daily language…fingers crossed that it stays that way.

(The photo is from a couple days ago, the morning after it snowed)

franglais and sarko gets hitched

The boyfriend forwarded this article about speaking franglais, something which I have been known to do more often than I'd like to admit. A couple of amusing franglais examples come from a friend who lived with a French speaking family in Belgium during her senior year of highschool. Once when she was feeling sick she said “Je suis malade, j'ai besoin de vomiter” (the proper verb is vomir). Another occured when she was have breakfast with her host family and asked if the yoghurt had “preservatifs”. FYI – un preservatif = a condom. Fortunately her family had a sense of humor.

On an unrelated note, Sarkozy has married his ex-wife's sister. Not really, but the Carla-Cecilia resemblance can't be missed. Now that Sarko and Bruni are officially hitched, foreign goverments don't have to worry about protocol issues (i.e. where does she sleep and where does she sit during dinner.)

Read about Sarko and the new Mrs. here, here or here.