On my birthday, Lana came home with a card that she had made at school. It was a very cute card with a picture of her & me inside. The thing that struck me was that on the front was written, “Happy Birthday Mum.” I could however make out that she had first written mom, but that it had been erased with MUM written over it.

Since my birthday was in February, she had only been “exposed” to Australian kids for a month. This surely was not enough time for her language to be corrupted influenced by her peers. Well, it ends up that she had made me the card and her little friend I.L. in seeing that she had misspelled ‘mom’ erased it and ‘correctly’ wrote out mum. At that moment I knew Lana & I needed to have a mother to daughter chat. I explained to her that I liked her saying ‘pardon’, rather than ‘why’ and that I could accept her calling ketchup, ‘tomatoe sauce’, but that I drew the line at mum. I told her (and her father who quickly saw this as a weak spot) that no matter where we were living, that I would always be her MOM!

A few weeks later, we were in a very cute stationery shop. As I looked around, Sophia approached me and asked me if I would buy her a rubber. My immediate response was, “Hell no! You’re six,” but as the words came to me, I saw she was holding up a cute little pig eraser.  I’ve had to capitulate and allow her to use that word as it’s difficult to explain to a six year old why that word does not sound right to this mom’s ear when spoken by a child.

Since our arrival in Sydney, all of us have had our language impacted by this experience. Just yesterday in LAX I was trying to sort out where to retrieve my pram. After being asked what a pram was I said, “You know a push chair.” It was only on my third try that I remembered that it’s called a stroller.

Our neighbor and Lana collaborated on some videos that highlight some of the differences between our languages: clothes, school words & school words 2.  (I apologize for how quickly they fly through the reading of words, but I can only load up short videos.)

I am not sure if you noticed that ‘er’ at the end of words sounds like, “ah”. For example, rubber is pronounced /rubbah/. The weekend after my friend and fellow American Jenny pointed that out to me, Lana had September as one of her spelling words. As she read them over I almost dropped the plate I was holding when she pronounced it /septembah/. When I screamed that she was turning into an Aussie she quickly responded, “Would you prefer I say SeptmebER?” It’s so interesting to see how aware she is not only of her speech, but mine as well. She is always the one who notices when I say Gar-ahge or when I offer the kids TomAtoe sauce.

Rather than fight the ‘Australianization’ of my kids English, it’s something we chuckle about. Yet once when we were discussing my hesitating to use Australian English she came backat me with something I told her in Portugal. “When you’re in another country you should respect the native language, by trying to use it.” I guess she got me there.