Language Barriers

Well, the struggle to pick up Kyrgyz continues. Maybe I should actually study. It’s all around me, but I have a tendency to zone it out unless someone’s speaking directly to me, and that’s really not helping. My host family has become more interested in learning a little English though, so that’s fun. We sit and exchange words back and forth. English is really just an auxiliary language here that a few people take really seriously and everyone else just kinda messes around with. Knowing a few phrases like “My name is” and “I love you” is a good trick and wearing clothes with creative English phrases is cool. A 5th form student was wearing an Adidias knock-off windbreaker the other day that read “Best the fashion frog prince boy” across the back. Very cool.

And we had an English Olympiad last week in which our village competed against the neighboring villages to see who would go to the regional Olympiad. One of the essay topics our students had to prepare for was “The Youth Problem.” I was very confused by this and had to ask what exactly the youth problem was. Well, you see, the youth don’t go to school and have no jobs, so they steal things and become druggies. The solution to this problem is youth clubs, such as the bird watching clubs that are popular in Great Britain. Hmmm. Apparently that question wasn’t actually used in the Olympiad this year though and instead the students had to write about their dream houses—a topic probably equally irrelevant to them. One of my English Club students will be headed to the regionals though and my counterpart/team teacher has selected a few 8th graders to groom for next year’s competition.

So you may wonder where Russian fits into all this. Pretty much everyone in Kyrgyzstan knows Russian, which is helpful because a lot of TV shows, movies and printed materials are in Russian. And if these things weren’t originally in Russian, they have been dubbed or translated at least. For the most part, Kyrgyz is spoken throughout Kyrgyzstan while Russian is spoken in the larger towns and cities in the northern part of the country (and Uzbek is spoken in the southern part of the country). This bilingual system is especially challenging for volunteers, because we’re only taught one language or the other, and you’re bound to offend somebody along the way because of this. The Kyrgyz are usually pleased to find a foreigner learning Kyrgyz over Russian, and this works out in the villages where you’d feel left out not understanding any Kyrgyz. However, it can be a problem in the cities where you may run into Russians who speak no Kyrgyz at all. Then there’s the fact that almost everyone initially addresses us in Russian because they assume all foreigners in Kyrgyzstan speak Russian. It’s great to check out their expression when you ask “Kyrgyzcha?”—“in Kyrgyz please?” Though it might be worth learning a little Russian for the bazaar. All in good time.