Lingo (From Asian Image)

Lingo

3:17pm Wednesday 16th February 2011 in Last Bit By The Last Bit

Does he speak the language or doesn’t he?

It had to come. All these years we tried and tried to teach the people the language of our forefathers.

Now, most of the inbreds can’t string a sentence together.

Those who do speak it do so in some sort of strange tone with a hint of Asian and Northern accents.

In time gone by you knew where you stood. Either you spoke it fluently and were fresh as they came or you couldn’t say a word and got the P*** taken out of you.

In those great gatherings of yesteryear the young man or woman who couldn’t speak the lingo was ridiculed. And rightly so.

Before you could answer a question in the native language some smart Abdullah would interject. He may have just got off the PIA flight but he knew when it was time to step up to the plate.

‘Don’t speak to him he don’t speak the language.’ He would then translate it for you slowly like you had some sort of hearing disorder.

This was soon followed by the immortal phrase - ‘Putter, you need to learn this stuff. Kids these days’. I was 27?

The fellas who got married to the ladies from their native homeland soon found themselves having to converse with the other half. And if he couldn’t his life was as good as over.

Even if her husband had more intelligence than her whole village put together she still looked down upon him like the lowlife scum of the earth he was.

‘Huh..what did I marry? I might as well have stayed in the pind (village)’.

Strange thing was she learnt the odd words very quickly..most notably the meanings for ‘money’, ‘sale’ and ‘bank account’.

As time went by the language morphed into something peculiar. We ended up making new words up. Like ‘Taylut’, ‘Krinton’, ‘Soofa set’, ‘washing podhar’, ‘bideo philam’, Usdah, ‘Crips’, ‘Essun Image’ and my all time favourite ‘prend’.

But it all had to end. I was sat in room recently and the poor fella who couldn’t speak English was left to rot in his own hell. As soon as some elder walked in his eyes lit-up.

But then he realised he spoke English too. Oh dear.