Careful, someone might hear you!

A friend of mine had this piece of advice for all speakers:

Always assume that the microphone is still on!

In a wider sense, it’s that logical approach (who does logic?) that you need to watch what you say in public, particularly something untoward, because when you least suspect it, someone’s bound to hear you. And this goes doubly so for when speaking in another language. You might think that you can say something unpleasant about that person in front of you in a language you assume they don’t understand, but assumption is the mother of all stuff-ups.

Here’s the proof…    

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the Macedonian theatre group Bumerang in Melbourne regularly showcased comedy plays that would lampoon the craziness Macedonians faced living in Australia. Their shows would sell out and the videos of the plays would be worn out from constant play in the VCRs of the extravagant homes of tens of thousands of Aussie-Massos.

One sketch that particularly got Macedonians in Australia laughing was one that was set in a typical Melbourne tram. Three Macedonian women on their way home after pulling extra-long shifts at work are gossiping away in true Macedonian style. Of course, the one-upmanship is in full force, with one of the mothers boasting that they love their 17-year-old son soooo much that they even bought him a hot-rod of a car, complete with “wide tyres” as they wouldn’t want their son to be in danger hanging around on Melbourne trams. How loving of them!

Soon after, a young man appears on the tram. Of course, these Macedonian women would “never judge”… well, not much. Going by looks alone, the women have the superpowers to work out this scruffy young man’s entire biography – of course, he must be from Anglo origin as he’s unkempt, probably homeless (his jeans are ripped, as was the fashion at the time) and unemployed. Yes, the story gets quite elaborate. The guy comes and sits on the empty seat next to one of the women. He says hello to them in English, but the women go all shtum. They continue their dissection of this young man’s supposed tragic life in front of him, but of course being Anglo-Australian, he’d have no idea what they’re saying as the women are all talking in Macedonian… well, the Australian dialect of Macedonian, with its heavy borrowings from and code-switching with Australian English.

The young man attempts to speak to the women in that typically friendly Aussie way, but the women feign no knowledge of English in the same way my grandmother used to do – waving her open hand and saying “No spik Inglish”. That doesn’t change the guy’s otherwise happy-go-lucky demeanour. He then does something untypically Aussie and offers the sweets (“lollies” in Australia) that he has in a paper bag to the judging women. No, the women refuse in that false-modesty way so typical of Macedonian mothers. That’s when one of the women warns the other two by saying “ne zemvajte zheni… mozhe da bide drugs!” (Don’t take any… it could be drugs). Macedonian does have a word for “drugs”, but here the woman used the English word. Yeah, he won’t understand *eyeroll*

Suddenly, a young woman gets on the tram and she notices the three Macedonian woman. This woman is also Macedonian and so she immediately approaches them and greets them all in Macedonian and kisses them three-times on the cheeks in that typically Macedonian way… and then she notices the guy…

“Nikola, what are you doing here? Kako si?”

Nikola? What! That’s a Macedonian name! The woman are shocked!

Nikola: “I’m going home from uni”

Young woman: “Didn’t you know that these women are Macedonian?

Nikola: “I didn’t know them… but they certainly know a lot about me”

Major laughs in the audience! The women are visibly embarrassed and are covering their faces in shame. Nikola understood EVERYTHING they had to say. And word will get around about this, and they know it!

Nikola then gets off the tram with the young Macedonian woman, but as he leaves, he blows a giant kiss to our lovely ladies.  

A lesson has been learnt here.

[The Australian dialect of Macedonian in action in this song, Don’t Beri Gajle (“No Worries”) by the actors of Bumerang. Plenty of random mixing of Macedonian with Australian English.]

There are clips on social media extolling the benefits of being bi- or multi-lingual. One of the points they make is that you’ll be able to speak about others and they won’t understand you. This also extends to monolinguals in that you can speak in your language when travelling in place where they don’t speak your language and no-one will understand you.

But like with so many things on this dying planet, that’s not a 100% guarantee. For as what happened with the Macedonian women on the Melbourne tram, when you least suspect it and no matter how obscure the situation, someone’s going to know what you are saying!

And I should know, as I’ve been privy to some pretty hot gossip… and worse… all because some unsuspecting loose-lips has been blabbing about the private lives of others and their own in another language and thinking no-one understands. Hey… I understand!

Somewhat interestingly, the language that has provided the most eavesdropping for me has been Bulgarian. That is understandable for the period I’ve been living in London, where there are so many Bulgarians (Slavi Trifonov, a Bulgarian comedian and singer who then became Bulgaria’s answer to David Letterman and now is the leader of his own political party sold out all 20,000 seats in the London O2 Arena). But the best stuff has come from when I was a teenager and in my early 20s in Adelaide, Australia. Now there aren’t that many Bulgarians in Australia (it’s nowhere near the number of Macedonians, let alone huge groups like Chinese or Indians) but they were particularly concentrated in the western Adelaide suburb I lived in – Fulham Gardens, forming the largest Bulgarian community in Australia. At a prime location on the main road that dissected the suburb in two stood the imposing Bulgarian Hall, with its clubrooms on the side (the amount of times my grandmother would summon me to to fetch my grandfather from there!) and the Bulgarian Orthodox church at the back. Back in the 1930s, when no-one wanted to live in Fulham Gardens due to the swampy nature of the land there and all the mosquitoes, Bulgarians (and Macedonians) bought up the land there and transformed the area into productive market gardens. They were responsible for making tomatoes a thing in Adelaide. Come the 1990s, and with the Bulgarian borders now flung open and anyone who could fleeing (pretty much all of them computer programmers), the community suddenly had an influx of newcomers. Mind you, as my family was primarily involved with the rival Macedonian community (though my grandfather comes from what is now Bulgaria), most of the Bulgarians of Fulham Gardens had no idea who I was, but they certainly knew my grandparents and my mother. Actually, one of the few Bulgarians I knew at the time was Bobby, the Bulgarian priest’s son, who was in my year level at primary school and lived at the other end of the same road as my family. My high school though was in the centre of Adelaide, so that meant commuting by bus every day. Regulars on the bus home was a distant relative of my grandmother’s, Dedo (Grandfather) Atanas and his wife who my grandmother had nicknamed “Cleopatra” – not because she bore any resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor’s portrayal of the Macedonian-Egyptian queen but because she was adored and doted upon much like Cleopatra. My mother later nicknamed Dedo Atanas “Uncle Arthur” as most of the men with the name “Atanas” in Australia adopted “Arthur” as their English name, and it was also the name of a popular comedic character on Australian TV at the time, created and acted by Glenn Robbins (Kel from Kath and Kim fame). Dedo Atanas had identified as Macedonian when he was younger, but in the mid-1960s he changed allegiance and became “Bulgarian”. So his persistent goal was to coax me to defect to the other side and realise that I am not Macedonian but Bulgarian. He even tried to fob off Bulgarian propaganda written by pseudo-historian and former Bulgarian KGB operative Bozhidar Dimitrov to me, to no success. Now when they were on the bus, that meant I’d be speaking in my grandmother’s dialect of Macedonian, so that could have set off signs to others who could understand. The thing is that there had been much intermingling between Macedonians and Bulgarians in Fulham Gardens in the 1940s to 1960s, leading to the creation of a local hybrid Macedonian/Bulgarian dialect. Most of the old-guard Bulgarians of Fulham Gardens were able to code-switch from standard or eastern Bulgarian into Macedonian (in the Florina/Lerin dialect).

But not the new lot. And so it was with them that I was able to hear some truly scandalous goss.

One day while commuting home from school with my sister, we were standing on the crowded 287 bus quite close to the front door at a section where there side seats that opened up to the aisle allowing passengers with limited mobility to access them with ease. With my sister and I looming over these passengers, two of them, women in their 50s, were talking in Bulgarian to each other. It was the usual stuff – the weather, what they did at work, etc., but then the conversation went on the juicer details of other Bulgarians in Adelaide. I didn’t capture the name but one of the women mentioned how there’s this one woman who’s a bit of a slut, and that she has three children from three different men and she doesn’t know who are the fathers of these children! Wild!!!

My sister, who has a good ear for this gossip and could understand Bulgarian quite well at the time, looked at me when we heard this rather hot stuff. It was quite obvious that she was about to burst into complete laughter and blow our cover (it was obvious that the women didn’t know we could understand what they were saying) so I motioned to my sister that we need to weave our way through the crowded bus towards the back… which we did in that way teenagers in school uniform can only do. And once we did make it back, we killed ourselves in laughter! Wow, we wondered who was this “floosy” to get Bulgarian tongues wagging like this?

Fast forward a few years, and my sister and I, now in our uni years, get on the bus at the bus stop that’s right around the corner from the Bulgarian Orthodox church, on our way into town for a spot of clothes shopping. Getting on the bus and the first thing we notice is that at the back seat there are two guys sitting very close to each other with their arms around each other’s shoulders. My reaction is that it was pretty gutsy for a gay couple to be showing such affection like that on an Adelaide bus. I signalled to my sister for us to go sit in the seat just in front of them so that we can suss out who these out-and-proud gay guys are.

Well, that’s my Aussie mind at work there. Because, as we got close to them, we could quickly then tell by the clothes they were wearing that they were not gay at all but recent arrivals from somewhere in the Balkans. Bosnia most likely as the war was happening then and Australia was receiving a steady stream of “imports” (as we disparagingly called them), but no, it only took a few seconds to hear them talk – they were Bulgarians, and they were doing what typical Bulgarian blokes of their age do. Then they got a bit too typical. The bus started moving and then they started making comments. OK, my sister is a natural blonde and has a more Russian/Polish look than someone typical from the Balkans, and my sister and I as Aussie-born Macedonians always speak to each other in English, so there was nothing to distinguish us as anyone who could understand Bulgarian (note, colloquial Bulgarian and Macedonian are very mutual intelligible). That’s when one of the guys says to the other in Bulgarian: “hey, check out the tits on this blonde chick in front of us”. That’s when mid-conversation with me, my sister immediately turns to the guys and shouts at them with one of the few Bulgarian words my sister knows:

“Разбрах!”

(“I understood!”)

Busted!

The guys were shocked out of their minds. They didn’t suspect at all that my sister knew what they were saying!

I start laughing at the situation. The guys now are so embarrassed that they don’t know where to put themselves. They have no choice – they get up from the seat, go to the exit door, press the stop button and as soon as the bus stops, they make the quickest getaway I’ve ever seen. They’d have to wait another 30 minutes for the next bus to come. Hilarious!!!

And then there was this one time… again on the 287 bus to Fulham Gardens… when I heard two young Bulgarian women (recent immigrants to Australia) talking about what they were (not) doing at work. What stood out for me was how one of them was condescendingly talking about a colleague called Brian, who she says does everything for her – makes cups of coffee, lets her use his stuff, etc. Honestly, he sounds like a top bloke! Nah, not for these two darlings, who painted this nice guy to be a complete loser. The same woman also went into detail about her gritty divorce and that she’s going after every stotinka her ex has… so she wasn’t really painting a nice picture of herself. I’ve never really had much of a poker face, so I’m sure I was giving a look of disgust at the revelry she was showing at this.

[Macedonian song from 1995 – “Nasekade nas nè ima” (“We’re Everywhere”) that claims Macedonians can be found everywhere in the world. Hey, Zoran has a point!]

It’s always surprising where I’ve encountered “my” people in the most unsuspecting of places. The Balkans have songs and sayings that “we can be found everywhere”. As I child I used to hear stories of how one great-great-grandfather of mine died in a railway accident somewhere in the Wild West of the USA, or that my grandfather had a cousin that ended up in Patagonia, Argentina. I thought these to be tall tales of the type that my father would say (he would be adamant that there were actually Macedonian Dodo birds, even if they were just made up for an episode of Bewitched), but the more I travelled, the more there are grounds to these otherwise seeming exaggerations. And guess what? Apart from the Macedonian Dodo birds, those stories did turn out to be true – my great-great-grandfather’s last place of residence, as recorded in the 1910 US Census, was right next to the rail marshalling yard in Granite City, Illinois in the greater St Louis metropolitan area, but he died soon after in an accident while working in a railway maintenance team in the wilds of Montana! And I do have very distant relatives in Esquel, in the Andes foothills in Patagonia, Argentina.

Here’s one of those surprise encounters…

A few years ago, I was on the ferry from Malta to Gozo, in the middle of winter. Hardly any tourists around! I sit down with my pastizzi (hey, it’s Malta) and two people sit next to me speaking a language that clearly isn’t Maltese.

That’s the cue for me to work out what language they’re speaking.

I listen in for a moment.

• Slavic… ✔️
• Southern Slavic…✔️
• Bulgarian? Ne!
• No way!!! It’s Macedonian!!!

And not just any Macedonian – it’s my father’s dialect, from his hometown of Kochani! Of all places!

Turns out they were from Kochani, living and working in Malta.

And it didn’t stop there...

That same day I also bumped into:
🟢 a group of Bulgarian women on a bus
🟢 a Croatian woman and her child on the return ferry (distinctly speaking in the Zagreb dialect, where they use “kaj” instead of the “što/šta” for “what”
🟢 two Serbian men on another bus (the 50 and in Mosta, for those who know Malta well) sitting behind me and loudly complaining about the price of cigarettes 🚬

It’s a small world!

Honestly, I think it’s been Bulgarian that has provided the most surprises, and top of the list have been in Africa!

The first time happened the first time I went to Tanzania – the first time I was in sub-Saharan Africa. My friend there, who was working as an architect, introduced me to one of his expat architect colleagues… who happened to be Bulgarian! She was married to a Tamil-Malaysian man and had been living in Tanzania for a decade. She did though return to Bulgaria to give birth to their daughter, who is effectively a native Swahili-speaker. When chatting with her how come she ended up in Tanzania of all places, her response was: “To get as far away as possible from the Balkans as possible”. Now that’s a read!

The second time happened in Ethiopia in 2023! Thanks to no less than three wars happening inside the country, my travels in Ethiopia were confined to Addis Ababa and the immediate vicinity, and any trip beyond the capital was best done with guides who know what they’re doing. And when there were trucks heading out of Addis filled with young men brandishing Kalashnikovs, that was the sign that things were volatile. Taking no chances, I opted for a guided trip to at least one Ethiopian Orthodox church complex – to Debre Libanos monastery. The van with my guides came to pick me up first, so given the decreased number of visitors to Ethiopia at the time due to the aforementioned wars, I thought I was in luck and that I’d be on my own. Nope… soon after two Italians joined us. OK, three of us – that’s not bad. But there was another stop at another hotel in Addis, and in came into our van an older couple who looked like they could’ve been my parents. Well, I was close. The couple started speaking amongst themselves… and I couldn’t believe at first that they were speaking in Bulgarian! No way could Bulgarians afford such a trip was my first thought. So I introduced myself in Bulgarian. Shocks all round! They expected that they’d be the only Bulgarian-speakers in the van. So yes, I spent most of that day in Ethiopia speaking in Bulgarian. And we covered the usual Bulgarian topics – endemic corruption, conspiracy theories (they believed them all), the mafia, how much have we bribed the police, Delyan Peevski, how halva tasted better in communist times, guessing Lili Ivanova’s real age… you get the picture.    

But then there was another moment – but with a very different vibe!

Late Friday night on the London Tube. As per usual, most people on board were some level of inebriated. However, there was one couple who was being particularly obnoxious and thought it’d be loads of fun to shout out offensive things… in Bulgarian.

They were mocking the other passengers.
They were so confident no one else understood them.
They were wrong.

I was absolutely appalled at their behaviour, so I wondered what should I do to teach them a lesson. So I channelled my sister and meticulously planned my attack. The Tube was pulling up to my destination station. I waded my way past the drunks and made it to the middle section of the carriage to where our rude Bulgarians were. As I was getting off at my station, I faced the couple, looked straight at them and sternly said one word...

🔥 Разбрах!

The look on their faces? Absolutely priceless!

So yeah – watch your mouth! You never know when someone like this Aussie polyglot might be quietly listening… and then decide to let you know.