As most of you probably know, I'm Dutch. For the past two years that I've been rather active on the internet, I got to read and write a lot of English. You should think that I know how to do that by now. However, I still have to look up a lot of words every day. This is mainly because I frequent IRC channels (like #beyondunreal) with a lot of Brits that use really weird slang. I also have some trouble writing in English. It's not easy writing in a language that you have never actively spoken; not even for a few months or so. No matter how good you are at grammar and spelling, it's really hard to give sentences the right "feel". In Dutch, people will always know when I'm playful, mad or happy, even when I don't use emoticons. I can express myself without having to make the extra step of thinking about how to set my thoughts down in words. In IRC, I often find myself sitting at the keyboard, staring out the window, looking in the dictionary, thinking about what words I should use to express myself the right way.

I'm not the only one who has trouble with this. I read in the newspaper the other day that Dutch scientists write more and more of their papers in English. They also give their presentations in English. Their aim is, of course, to reach a bigger public and get more attention that way. It seems, however, that this isn't doing them any good. I have had the honour to attend some of these presentations and I understand why. It really doesn't sound credible if someone with a terrible accent like this tries to explain the importance of a complex scientific discovery.

Speaking of accents, the only English I hear regularly is the English on the TV and in movies and 90% of that is American-English. The only British-English I get to hear is in Fawlty Towers and Monty Python. No wonder I'm having such a hard time to figure out what those Brits are saying if I ever have the chance to meet up with some in real life.

There's another problem. I first noticed this when one of my friends came back from a year's visit to the United States a couple of months ago. He had a hard time finding certain Dutch words and phrases. Of course we laughed at him for that, but now I realize that my other friends and even myself do it a lot too. We think about words for a long time and end up saying stuff in English. We say things that are complete nonsense in Dutch, but which on second thought turn out to be literal translations of English phrases. We will certainly come to the point where we will only be able to express ourselves in some weird hybrid language.

How come this works only one way? I've never seen an Englishman accidentally write a German word in his text, even though there are a lot of Germans on the internet. I think we should mix stuff up a bit. A German or a Dutchy shouldn't be afraid to use some words of his own language in chatrooms. Perhaps this will eventually lead to some new, weirdly mixed internet language. Dat would be toll, no? Hoi! Free sex for all languages!!

Next week: TomWithTheWeather