Speechless

“What's the English word for someone who speaks two languages?” my translator asked.

“Bilingual,” I answered.

“And three languages?” she asked.

“Trilingual.”

“And just one language? Wait I know – it's American!” She smiled innocently and took a dainty bite of her khachapuri.

At age 23, Sopo spoke English with a barely detectable accent, also German, Russian, her native Georgian, and her grandmother's native dialect – Migrelian.

I can say good morning, thank you, I want a beer, and where is the toilet in English, Spanish, Georgian and Armenian now, but there are a surprising number of situations that call for more sophisticated communication. A half dozen years ago Sopo and I were having lunch in a refugee town close to a Russian Military outpost when a teenage kid grabbed her purse – which contained several hundred dollars in travel money and her personal cell phone – and took off running.

I chased after him and started to yell something, but I got stuck. For the life of me I couldn't think of the Georgian word for stop or thief or anything else that seemed appropriate. I decided to shout “No!” but as soon as the word “Ori!” left my lips I realized I'd just yelled “Two!”

With nothing to say, I just kept chasing and the thief kept running, and running, and running – out of the business district, through a park where kids were playing ping pong and old men were playing backgammon, between three-story apartment buildings and toward the soccer stadium. The kid kept looking back over his shoulder and I kept making hand gestures that were probably as meaningless in Georgian as they were in English.

People gave us quizzical looks as we passed. I'd been training for a marathon so I could run for hours, but I soon started having second thoughts about keeping up the chase. I became more and more aware that I was the only person in sight not dressed head-to-foot in black, and I was getting farther and farther from the only other English-speaking person I knew within 50 miles. The kid was local, I was obviously not, and we were heading into a bad-looking neighborhood.

I half expected to round a corner and find myself surrounded by heavily armed gang members, saying things like, “Them khaki pants sure is purty, stranger, why don't you just give them to us raat now.” (In my nightmares, bad guys always talk like hillbillies.)

So I tried to think of ways to mime, “Back off, I represent a nuclear power.”

It actually felt a little anti-climactic when the kid finally got tired of being chased and dropped the purse.

When I retrieved it, an old woman standing nearby gave me a big smile and a few other people who'd seen what had happened gave me friendly, atta-boy looks. The town's assistant police chief, who happened to be driving by, gave me a ride back to the restaurant in his car. He spoke to me in Georgian as if I knew what he was saying. I smiled and I nodded as if I did and made hand gestures to give him directions.

At that point I started wondering how I would react if some non-English-speaking guy in funny clothes came chasing a kid through my neighborhood. I suppose a lot of my neighbors would wonder why the hell he hadn't bothered to learn English before stepping on our soil, and some would suggest he shouldn't be allowed here at all.

Communication problems are a fact of life in most of the world where it's never more than a couple of hundred miles between cultures or tribes who speak different languages. Language provides an easy way to distinguish between “us and “”them” and a thick wall that discourages communication. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian is no longer taught to all school children in the Soviet Republics, and that translates into the loss of the single common language in much of Eurasia. It's blamed for an increase in tension in countries such as Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia where there are a dozen native languages and dialects.

When the Georgian coordinator of the project I was working on heard I'd chased a purse snatcher, she scolded me. “In that awful town,” she said. “He could have had a gun.”

“I don't speak Georgian,” I said. “I wouldn't have understood if he'd had one.”

She started to say something, then she stopped and stared at me as if I was speaking a foreign language.