Sounds of my languages

NOTE: I swore on Nico's blog to join in the Link Love game once I'd gotten some work done on my Licentiate thesis (which has kinda not happened today, since I had a teaching gig and a lot of reading distracting me).

Incidentally I think I should name my thesis something (he's a he, by the way, I'm pretty sure of that). Anyone with an idea for a name for my thesis, please leave a comment! I'm thinking that a name ending with 's' would be appropriate... My latest notion was 'Henry', although I'm ambivalent on that...

To the point.

I sometimes really regret not having a swedish writing outlet. I've spent my parallel brain's capacity today listening to swedish reggae and musing on how the sound of swedish is so very different from my working language (sci-fi english, if you will). Swedish is a very informal language and the vocabulary is nowhere near that of english, making the language I speak to get by in daily life VERY different from the wordical snobbisms I attempt here for kicks. ;)

It's the same with my mother's dialect of filipino (although I don't speak it myself) - feels like non-work, a come-home family language.

Also (and maybe Angela knows a ton about this, since she's currently studying how to tame and master all things pronounciation-related :), the melody of each respective language rings so differently. True, dialect can do a lot, but I agree with those who say swedish always sound a bit like the speaker's voice is doing a kind of soothing sing-song thing as they speak (with greater aberrations of tone the further south you go). To me it's a language of moderate excitement with few exclamation points. A lullaby language made for evenings in sofas.

The opposite applies to tagalog (the branch of filipino spoken by most of my maternal relations); I always figured it must be pretty hopeless to mope in tagalog. The sound of my relatives' voices when they speak it always remins me of a brass band. Lots of trumpets and staccatos, and a flurry of exclamation points. To top it all, they certainly beat the singsong-tone of swedish. So you have to be pretty upbeat in general to speak it convincingly, is my non-educated diagnosis...

Not sure why I started off on this tangent, but one thing is for certain; my english must be a hybrid of my parental mother tongues' tonalities. With an accidental Californian twist. Confuses the hell out of people around here, and it's pretty funny. Especially whenever my mom and I speak on the phone and alternate languages every other sentence or so.