Watch Your Language Blog

The Language Advantage

It's that time of year. We're all glued to the television, waiting to see who will make the first big mistake. Who will commit a cultural gaff so unforgivable it will lose them the entire competition. Who will come out unscathed on the other end as victors, having jumped through hoops, traveled far and wide trying to win favor from the locals and avoid cruel tricks played by their rivals along the way.

Politics? Who said anything about politics? I'm talking about The Amazing Race.

While I admit it's a guilty pleasure, I also watch the show religiously with a linguistic interest. It seems to be a given that the teams with a bit of Spanish or French under their belts have a slight advantage. It's also obvious when teams have mastered a few key phrases in each language: "faster" and "we're in a race" seem to be popular expressions. (Incidentally, all those women saying obrigado — "thank you" — to their cab drivers across Brazil? Good try, but ladies, change the "o" for an "a" — obrigada is what women say.)

Even having a capacity for quick language study has its benefits to the show's contestants, sometimes in a very direct sense. Last season, contestants were asked to learn 10 words in the Mòoré language as part of the Burkina Faso leg of the race. And on last night's episode, language played a bigger role than even some viewers might have realized.

The contestants found themselves in northern Brazil. They had encountered a challenge which left one team member searching a wall covered in writing to find the name of their next destination. Contestants ran back and forth, writing down names and numbers, asking the judge if they were correct. One contestant walked back to the judge and recited one of the graffiti he'd written down in Portuguese.

I nudged my husband, who was sitting on the couch next to me. "It's an inside joke. He just said 'the last team to arrive may be eliminated' in Portuguese." (This phrase appears on clues in every episode of the show.) I like to think that it was a joke shared by just a few of us, the contestant obviously not included.

English is supposed to serve well for most travelers who spend little time outside of hotels, airports, and taxicabs, but the number of shots the Amazing Race editors stick in of team members running around foreign streets screaming "English?! ENGLISH?!" tells me otherwise.

Which brings me to my favorite Amazing Race moment, when Season 7 contestants found themselves in Jodhpur, India, and had recruited a local to help them get train tickets. They told them where they needed to go and that they needed to find out from the ticket vendor when the next train departs. "Can you ask her that for us?" the contestants pleaded. The local nodded and turned to the ticket vendor.

"They want to to know when the next train departs," he said. In English. (SUZANNE)

Tags: language, television, travel
October 6, 2008