Gobbledygook

I'm certain that every linguist has noticed that there is a distinct period of linguistic adjustment on arriving in another country, one which thankfully gets shorter and shorter the more familiar one is with that language. For example, on the train back to France after having gone home to England for Christmas, I was fairly certain that most of the conversations being held around me were in some sort of alien tongue, however by the time we pulled in to the station I could understand everything sans problems. It doesn’t only work in one direction; I’ve found that going to the UK has the same gobbledygook effect for a little while, particularly when I’m picking up conversations. The brain has a fascinating way of creating expectations – I’m accustomed to hearing French in the streets, so that is what my brain is listening out for when I first get back to England, and my native tongue makes no sense.

What I didn’t expect was for this effect to be so specific. As I’ve just mentioned, I expect most daily speech to be in French, no problems there, and conversations with my Anglophone friends to be in English. No problems there either. However, I was doing some work with radioclassique.fr on in the background, which was merrily tinkling away with sonatas and whatnot. After a while, the presenter began to speak and I barely understood a word. I can only imagine that this was due to my expectation that classical music on the radio is followed by an English-speaking presenter (I usually listen to Classic FM), and I was totally thrown by it. Now that I’ve got used to it, I wonder if the same thing will happen once I get back to the UK?