As the paradigms of our new reality shift around us, the changes we’ve become used to seeing in our surroundings begin to reflect in the linguistic world around us. Jera Toporis explores the ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic has begun to influence the way we interact with language: through a triptych focusing on the language of our new reality; the development of language in isolation and the role of silence in shaping language. Starting this triad off is a piece entitled ‘An Illusion of a New Reality Before the New Reality’. 

An Illusion of a New Reality Before the New Reality

It is mid-March and after six amazing months of eating tapas and drinking tinto de verano with people I met across Spain, everything is shut overnight and life seems to be put on hold with a blink of an eye as Pedro Sánchez, the president of Spain, announces: “Mañana se decretará el estado de alarma en todo nuestro país.” As of tomorrow, the country will shut down and people are asked to stay home. In less than five minutes of this official statement where a surreal idea of a ‘new reality’ is presented, who-knows-how-long of an unexpectedly strict lockdown is imposed and terrifying uncertainty about the future follows. Fear and panic kick in.

My plans to go see the Fallas of Valencia that weekend get cancelled, as does the idea of spending the Semana Santa in northern Spain. Instead, I am stuck in my flat in Granada with my Andalusian flatmate. Disappointed and shocked, I’m convincing myself that this won’t last long, and life will go back to normal soon enough. And yet, there is a silver lining: I have just been given a sudden abundance of time to focus on improving my Spanish by listening to official statements on the pandemic situation and later discussing them with my friend. Win-win, right?

Well, not quite. As it turns out, estado de alarma is still a thing roughly a month later and there’s no end to it for the foreseeable future. By that time, my friend has gone home already, so about halfway into April I call her and the first thing she asks me is if I’m still speaking Spanish with someone to keep up the practice. I take a second before slowly and somewhat unconvincingly saying yes.

I don’t tell her that I’ve kind of stopped speaking to people because now I don’t have anyone to have sometimes stupid, sometimes deeply philosophical late-night conversations with. I just don’t see how small talk could replace those nights of our mutually exchanged sabiduría that have helped me to remarkably improve my Spanish proficiency and, through that, grasp upon previously unknown life perspectives. 

So I don’t tell her that my only current involvement with the language are online University lectures which I don’t even pay much attention to anyways. She also doesn’t know that my leading teacher of Spanish these days turns out to be the telly as I let myself drown in news, but it’s getting all mixed up with Slovenian and English as I start reading other sources that cover the pandemic situation in my home country and in the UK. I notice only briefly that my judgement of trustworthiness and urgency of the situation starts to fade away as my reaction to the news varies greatly, depending on the wording used and the language I have received them in. 

What I don’t realise at the time of that phone call, though, is that my flatmate’s concern lies precisely in this – she is worried about me trying to keep normality in line by being immersed not only in the passive reception of news, but also engaging in active discussion of the received information with other people. My auto-piloted brain doesn’t get it yet that efficient communication of our thoughts and emotions is crucial, especially in times of crisis like this.

Fast-forward to mid-May when, for the first time in three years that I have been away from home, it feels strange to be returning for summer. It simply doesn’t feel right to be leaving a country I have fallen in love with without the proper goodbye I was hoping for. My heart feels heavy and I feel completely unprepared for the return to my birthplace; I haven’t had the time to assimilate this abrupt change from a foreign language to my own, either, so I am returning with a freshly developed fear of not being understood once I arrive to Slovenia. I don’t feel many people there can even imagine the severity of experiencing the pandemic in a hard hit foreign country alone, so I often don’t even bother talking about it. My favourite words during summer become: ‘Yeah, I’m just happy to be home.’

It is now September already and it still feels odd to be immersed in Slovenian on a daily basis. When this sudden social change kicked in, I foolishly expected it to be done and over with a simple announcement overnight, just as it started. By now, I should already be packing for my return to Glasgow, but that’s not happening yet this year. Instead, I am home away from home and ready to delve further into what juggling languages and their respective realities means for our modern society as a new reality finally starts to kick in.