Italech or Frenlian

In my French class there are four Italians, a Portuguese and me. For the first couple of weeks, we were all doing quiet well. Perhaps because we spent most of the time mastering, “My name is Annie, I am American, I am a student,” in French, of course. This week, however, classes got decisively harder. Suddenly we were talking about what the people from our country were like. When the teacher asked Amanda from Milan, the first thing she clarified for our saintly teacher is that, “In Italy, people are different depending on where they are from, the north, the center, or the south.” As she said that she was looking around both in trepidation and affirmation. But Carlo, the medical student from Naples sitting to my left was too lost to understand or maybe he was too busy secretly text messaging a hit out on her from his cell phone to respond. It was clear, though, that we all arrived at our linguistic ceilings with this exercise. The Italians’ bad French slid into a mix of French and Italian that left our teacher stymied. The rest of us, however, could understand perfectly this new freakish hybrid language since Italian and Portuguese aren’t too far apart and Spanish is like Italian’s younger sister in terms of languages. By the time the last Italian was asked, I think more Italian in a bad French accent was spoken than anything else. One of the Italian students would say something and the rest of us would nod in agreement, while the poor teacher seemed stuck, so she just gave us our homewokr and sent us home. As we walked out we all lamented how we were going to end up speaking a language that only the 5 of us could understand.