Emigrants in London

Tuesday, 12th of April 2016

Is rather curious the effect that emigration has had in London. As you walk down the streets is possible to hear many different languages and dialects being spoken at the same time, mostly you can tell are tourist just visiting for a couple of days but there is a high percentage of non-english speakers living here.

This fascinating effect is mainly noticeable when it comes to services, whether at a restaurant, a hotel, at the bank or even at the Vodafone store. So, for past few days I had to deal with a lot of paperwork, give a lot of details about myself, sign loads of documents and meet with several people to start using their products and services. In all of those moments I dealt with emigrants such as myself.

At the hotel I was staying at previously, I had some problems due to them overcharging me with a room and when the woman working at the reception tried to fix the situation I heard her speak, for the first time, her native language (as we do when we are nervous). It turns out she was spanish so I could perfectly understand what she was saying. When dealing with my living arrangements issues, it was clear that my landlord was also not british and also not his company, it turns out he and his partners are from India, so when together they always speak hindi. Last week I was in a hurry so since I didnˋt have food at home yet, I decided to quickly stop at McDonalds, after taking my order, the lady turned to her collegues and started to speak french. 

I have many more examples of this that I was able to experience in just a week, it is great to understand that I am not the only one trying to adapt to the english way of living and that I am not the only foreigner here, but at the same time this comes with many problems. Putting aside issues like racism and xenophobia that might occur, the difficulty that I am finding here is communication because in the end, I am a portuguese native talking to another foreigner, both not using our mother tongues, trying to communicate in english, our second language, so is obvious that with our accents sometimes things get lost in translation.

It is natural that even if you are a perfect english speaker, but this is your second or third language, some things are not going to be understood but that is fine, you just have to repeat them and remember that if the person that is attending you was able to overcome his or her struggles, so will you.

From a portuguese girl surrounded by different cultures,

Mariana Fidalgo