The Silence

Good evening! Sorry for making you wait so long. I've been keeping myself busy again. Yesterday I wrote 13 pages for the thesis (I'm so proud of that) and today I went to class and studied Estonian for five hours... Exams are coming! I promised to write about cultural stuff and I like to keep my promises, so here it comes:

I've been having a serious culture shock for one week! It all started a week ago when we discussed about Lehtonen and Sajavaara's article, "The Silent Finn Revisited" (1997) in our English class. That was the moment when I realised that I'm no true Finn! The article says that: "The statement by Bertolt Brecht that Finns are silent in two languages can be considered just a cliché today". Well, that's a good start for an article, but after that opening statement so many strange things about Finns followed that I absolutely have to resign myself from being a Finn if those facts hold true.

For the sake of a good story line I guess I'll have to tell you a little bit about my own cultural background. Maybe it will also help innunderstanding why I find some arguments in the article so absurd. So, I grew up in the Eastern part of Finland, in a small town of less than 5000 people. As far as I remember (my family moved South when I was ten) lives in the North weren't silent at all. Very much the opposite: I remember having great, noisy parties in our big house (we were living in an old vicarage) with singing and dancing. Some times we even made a Finnish Swedes-style crayfish party in our garden since my mom comes from a Swedish-speaking family.

Like I said, we moved South when I was ten and it took some time to lose my funny Eastern accent. Our family grew bigger and louder (I got two noisy little brothers) and no,  I don't remember any silent moment from that period of my life. Dad was travelling a lot for his work and we also hosted foreigners in our house. I never found them noisier than my family but I did pity their ears! Years went by quite fast like they usually do and suddenly I was a teenager who wanted to try her own wings for the first time. I was still underage but after some time of persistent persuation my parents let me move to Brazil for one year. Going to Brazil was the best decision of my life by the way!

In the article Gudykunst (1989, p. 336) claims that: "Finns may be seriously handicapped by their silence-bound behaviour, which makes it rather difficult for them to open up and start communicating in such situations". Oh, shut up Gudykunst! I have to admit that I had some problems with communication in Brazil at first: I didn't know a single word in Portuguese! But it was in two weeks time that I was so tired of silence that I started to imitate every single word that I could recognize as a word and soon I was able to talk again. (And like my Brazilian "mom" said after that: "Nunca mais parou de falar" which means that when I started talking there was no end to it!)

"When we observe a Finn's communicative behaviour in these terms, we are mostly concerned with a Finn as a user of a foreign language, which adds one more discrepancy: the comparison is always with the native speakers of the target language using their mother tongue, and not with them as users of a foreign language." Yes, yes! That's what I'm talking about! I'm pissed of when Finns are always compared to Northern Americans in this kind of communicative investigations. And now I'll have to tell you a fact I've learned when I've been travelling and meeting people from different countries. Finns are told to be quiet in two languages while most people I've met are communicative in one language and silent in the rest of the 6000 languages of the world. For some reason, students from Scandinavia and from Finland succeeded in learning Portuguese pretty fast in Brazil whereas most of the Americans remained silent. So I would like to know where was this Gudykunst's typical Northern "silence-bound behaviour" then?

"While Americans make use of talk to gather information about the other party and to reduce uncertainty, Finns try to reach the same goal by making silent observations of the interlocutor. Representatives of Southern and Central European cultures become irritated, because they tend to assess their interlocutors by their skill in verbal argumentation and reasoning, and this is something that may be totally absent in situtation with Finns. Germans may regard Finnish quietness and silence as retirence, reserve, and even aimlessness (Tiittula, 1993)." I've never felt myself perfectly relaxed if there's an other person in the same room and we are just sitting there saying nothing. And this reminds me about my German roommate in Lisbon. She was so sweet and the best cook I've ever met. There was just one thing about her that was making me feel uncomfortable sometimes: she was too quiet! It was okay with her to spend hours together without a word and that was making me crazy. Does this prove I'm not a Finn anymore?

I was almost loosing my hope already and thinking that I've probably lost my Finnish identity while travelling around when I remembered something. I noticed that I still have something deeply Finnish inside of me: I'm the worst public speaker in Finland! You see, its not actually true what they say in the article: "A good speaker for a Finn is one who can give expression to what he or she wants to say briefly and efficiently without talking too much and too profusely." Even in Finland, a boring speaker is a boring speaker. A bigger problem is that most people don't like to give public speeches and are quite bad performers.

So, as the article says: "Finns may be less liable to intervene in public meetings and in classroom but participate with vigor in discussion in pubs, at marketplaces or in the sauna". It's easy to agree with this argument. Since I'm talkative I have many talkative (also Finnish) friends and my family is very talkative too (talkativeness may be something you inherit from your parents, I assume). Maybe because I love words so much, I've never actually thought about silence before but I have to say this new idea of "The Silent Finn" is interesting. At least it got me writing a lengthy post! :D

Talking about silence, check out this link about body language. It was quite fun!