All those natives ruining the language

we have to stop them before it's too late!!!

My friend Nataly and I were in a neighborhood park on a Saturday night, watching our daughters play on the slide when an older woman of about 80 hobbled over to our bench and asked, in Hebrew with a Russian accent, Ani ashev po be-pina beseder? “I’ll sit here in the corner ok?”

We said yes of course she could sit there.

She sat down next to me, looked around with a sigh, then turned to me and asked, in Hebrew, At noladet po? (“Were you born here?”). I said I was born in Russia. She said she was born in Ukraine, then switched to Russian and gestured towards a family having a picnic nearby: “See that bag?”

I looked at the blue and white shopping bag on their picnic blanket that said on it “Osher ad” in Hebrew which is the name of a supermarket chain but also means "happiness forever."

"My father’s name was Osher," she continued, “He was born in Kherson and his parents named him Osher... Can you imagine? A Jewish boy in Ukraine....? "

I said I couldn’t imagine. “Osher” (Hebrew for “happiness”) is a very very Jewish name. It’s so Jewish that I’ve never met a single Israeli named Osher. To give a name like this to a Jewish baby in Ukraine, at the beginning of the 20th century was outright dangerous.

She continued: “I didn't know what the word meant until I started learning Hebrew 30 years ago… And since then, and even now, every time I look at these bags, it gives me this warm feeling inside...." she patted her chest. “He died a long time ago, my father.”

She tells me the story of how she started learning Hebrew, in her 50s, back in Ukraine, how people told her she was too old to learn a new language….but she did it anyway, and when she came here she found that she spoke Hebrew even better than native Israelis.

At this point, she notices Nataly who is a native monolingual Israeli and so was left out of this conversation, and tells her the same story in Hebrew, which, despite the heavy Russian accent is very good for an average older immigrant from the former Soviet Union.

Then she says to her, in Hebrew: “Look: I vill tich you one rool now zat you vill never forget. You vill pass it on to your children and grandchildren, and grand-grand-children!!!”

Nataly says she’ll try.

The woman takes out a piece of paper and writes a number: 21

“Vat number is zat?” she asks.

“Esrim ve ehad” says Natalie… (21, literally “twenty and one”)

The woman writes another number (23): “And zis?”

“Esrim ve shalosh,” says Natali. She doesn’t know where this weird math test is going but I do.

"And zis?” (she shows 22)

Esrim ve shtayim.” (22)

“Wrong!” says the woman, triumphant. “Zat is not how you pronounce it! You’re supposed to say Esrim u shtayim!”

I don’t roll my eyes just because this woman is old and kind of endearing.

Nataly is curious: “Oh really? why?”

The woman explains that in Hebrew the conjunction ve ‘and’ turns into u if the next word starts with two consonants. That’s a rule that everybody who has learned Hebrew in the Ulpan knows but no native Israeli (except Nataly now) is aware of.

That’s the thing about language. It’s not static, it changes all the time, and what was “right” thirty years ago, might not be relevant anymore. Language courses often lag (far) behind and teach you the way you’re “supposed” to speak even though people haven’t spoken like this for 50 years. Or they teach students only the standard version of the language that is used in formal settings but not in everyday speech.

Early on I noticed that even though Portuguese has the pronoun nós for ‘we’, similarly to other Romance languages, Brazilians more often use the word a gente (pronounced a zhenche, literally ‘the people’) to mean ‘we.’

It is also used with the verb in the third person. So, “We want to eat” would be A gente quer comer (literally “The people wants to eat”) where quer is the 3rd person singular form of the verb querer ‘to want.’

I thought it was breathtakingly cool, but I wanted to double-check how commonly it is used and in which situations. And sure enough, there was some language pundit on Quora telling me it’s “bad Portuguese”:

Was it slang then?

Slang is not ‘bad’ either, it’s an integral part of the language.

When people say that slang is ‘bad’ or that any non-standard variety of the language is bad what they mean (whether they admit it or not) is that the people who speak this way are less valuable/smart/educated than the people who speak the standard variety.

We rarely think about it, but language doesn’t just have many dialects, it also has many different levels — ‘registers’ — of use. The same person will speak differently depending on whether she’s giving a TED talk versus trashing her ex during a girls’ night out under the influence of two glasses of wine.

The thing with slang is that it’s used only in specific contexts or only by specific groups of people. As a language learner, you just have to be very attuned to the language to know when / whether it’s appropriate for you to use it to avoid sounding like Borat.

For example, the English word “bro” is something you wouldn’t expect your grandfather to use because it’s slang that’s reserved for specific groups of people or in specific situations. You wouldn’t expect an intermediate-level English learner to use it either. It would be ridiculous. Or adorable, I don’t know.

Was a gente more like ‘bro’ or…. ?

But no, from my favorite Easy Portuguese videos, it seems like everyone from skateboarders to businessmen to grandmothers uses a gente for ‘we.’

Something tells me I should trust this Brazilian grandma more than the person on Quora 🤨

That means it’s probably informal and conversational (maybe not something that a news broadcaster would use) but not slang.

So methinks, unless a gente is hired as a news broadcaster on Brazilian TV any time soon, a gente is going to use a gente and not listen to language pundits on Quora.

That’s what I was thinking about as my friend Nataly was given a private Hebrew lesson by an 80-year-old immigrant from the former Soviet Union. When the lesson was over, she reached her hand across me to shake the old woman’s hand and said, sincerely “Thank you very much, I had no idea. Your Hebrew is amazing by the way.”

I seriously doubt though that she will be passing it on to her grandchildren.