Lingua Maastricht: How a City of Students is Remixing English

Communication is an integral part of human life. Since moving to a new city, about two and a half years ago now, I have been speaking my second language more frequently than my first. I am not the only student in Maastricht in this situation. Rather, many of us students — international and Dutch – share the same experience. Though we spend the day speaking English to one another, our mother tongues have never really left us; traces of what we grew up speaking are intertwined with how we speak to each other in English. Interestingly, the traces of our separate mother tongues have become intertwined with each other’s English as well – I do not speak how I used to speak in English class. I use new words, new sounds, new phrases, all borrowed from the languages and people who have shaped my experience in Maastricht.

In a way, my friends and I, but every other student in Maastricht in turn, are part of the process of language creation. The question then arises: If we are actively shaping a language, are we still speaking English? Have we created a new language through our shared and different cultures? Is there such a thing as Maastricht-English? 

Through this article, I hope to show you what makes a language, and whether we have yet created our own – to answer the most important question of all: have we earned polyglot-bragging rights? 

How do we acquire language?

To start our journey into the land of language theory, we first need to define what exactly constitutes a language. According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, it can be defined as “a system of patterns and symbols used to communicate. It is defined as the comprehension and/or use of a spoken, written, and/or signed (e.g., American Sign Language) communication system”. Language is thus, in its simplest definition, how we communicate. 

           How we classify a language as such is not undisputed. The simplest way of deciding whether we are speaking the same language is if two speakers from different regions can understand each other, even though they speak with different accents or use slightly different wordings. This is, however, not true in every case: speakers of Norwegian and Danish can probably understand one another when both are speaking their native language, but we still classify the two as separate. This has to do with the other markers which make a language: standardisation, recognition, linguistic features, historical evolution, and sociolinguistic identities. 

            Together, these characteristics exemplify why languages are not something that has simply been given to humans, but rather something that we have actively created. In the creation of many different countries, the national language serves to unify the people: through shared history and the choice to make one language universal, culture and language reinforce one another and, in turn, create a national, sociolinguistic identity. This explains why we consider Danish and Norwegian to be two different languages: when Norway became independent from Denmark, so became its language. Politics decided that the standardisation of Norwegian would be different than that of Danish. 

            As with all things created through generations, a language must be passed on to be kept alive. The most interesting acquisition of language is, in my humble opinion, that of children: as with all things children learn, they develop their speaking skills mostly through play. Kids don’t worry about the words they use, or whether their textual compositions are grammatically correct. Instead, they listen to what they hear, and repeat what they find interesting, what sounds funny. As we will see, this playful quality has not yet truly left us young adults. My own vocabulary has expanded in the past three years, mostly by incorporating words that sound funny. 

Maastricht-English

Now that we have looked at how languages form and evolve, let’s zoom in on Maastricht; it is time to look at our own language. Maastricht-English does not qualify as a language as it has not been standardised – no one has officially spoken it into existence. However, we can make a good case for the fact that our collective identity as students and our shared history in this city makes for a dialect of English. We can understand other English speakers and make ourselves understood to them, but we have our own cultural quirks. 

Maastricht-English may not be codified yet, but it lives where all hybrid languages begin: in jokes, misunderstandings, and inside phrases that don’t translate. As I am writing this, in real time, students from more than 50 countries are unconsciously building a hybrid dialect. Who among us hasn't heard phrases such as the occasional “bah” or “boh” when the Italians feel doubtful, or “oui, oui” when agreeing with the French? Along the same lines, I have heard many a “hello” become a “ciao” and watched a “goodbye” turn into a playful “doei doei” - a Dutch staple adopted by non-Dutch speakers, purely because it sounds fun. Or even into “bisous” - goodbye kisses from the French.

Other words do not simply function to replace English phrases, but have been added to our shared dialect because some things just do not translate: when really not wanting to do something, the French express that they have “la flemme”. As there is no universal English word which describes it, we have adopted this remarkably useful word for us students. In the same vein, “basta”, meaning stop, but with a much more definitive cultural connotation, has been integrated by many. The final example, one of my personal favorites, is the integration of “bravo, brava, brave, etc.” - used by the Dutch, French, and Italians, and spoken in our common English with different accents. 

Our native languages also influence our grammar and phrasing: “whatever you want to do, it is fine by me” has turned into “as you want” - a phrase that is English, and technically correct, but one that I have never heard a native speaker say. The French speakers will immediately recognise it, however, as “comme tu veux” is a staple for them. Similarly, many French and Italians utter “we did this with my friend” implying for the English that a group of people did something, with the addition of their friend. In reality, what the speaker is expressing is that he or she did something with their friend - including the friend in both the subject pronoun and emphasizing their presence later on in the sentence. Though it has made for some confusion, the avid attempt to include their friend in every part of the sentence is sort of wonderful, it makes things extra “gezellig” as the Dutch would say.

The interesting thing about these additions to our English is the fact that the words are as dynamic as the language they are included in: other speakers, from different countries, adopt the newfound words. This results in situations where the Dutch and Italians complain about having la flemme, and the French yell out basta when a joke has gone too far.  

Conclusion

Maastricht-English is not in any database, it has not been officially created. Combined with the fact that it has not revamped English severely enough so that it is not understandable for other speakers, it is not its own language. However, it is very much alive: It lives in us, it lives through our sentences. We utter words we never would have known if it weren’t for the people around us. So even though we haven’t created a new language in the traditional sense, we’ve built a new way of speaking, one that reflects the messy mix of who we are.

Though my examples originate from my circles, mostly including the French and Italians, different friend groups from Maastricht will undoubtedly have countless examples to share. How beautiful that we now all carry pieces of each other’s homelands with us - how beautiful that the people we have met in the past years have become a part of something we do everyday, of our speaking. So maybe we are not exactly polyglots, but we are something just as rare. We are part of a people who built a common language without even trying, one borrowed phrase and mispronounced goodbye at a time.