Albanian, Serbian & Turkish Languages with Educator, Author & Advocate Elizabeth Gowing: S7E6

Language can be a lens into culture, a way to share our experiences and a tool to help others.  These are some of the aspects of language that we discuss with guest Elizabeth Gowing. She worked in primary education in inner London before moving to the Balkans in 2006. From then until very recently she split her time between Kosovo, Albania and the UK. During her time in the Balkans she immersed herself in many of the languages used there and shares the cultural insights that she learned. One of these experiences while she was in Kosovo was co-founding the http://theideaspartnership.org/wp/ (Ideas Partnership) non-profit. She is also the owner of the https://www.facebook.com/sapuneKS (Sapune social enterprise), offering employment to village and minority community women and support to the education of their children. Elizabeth is also an author of five travel bookshttps: www.elizabethgowing.com/my-books and has translated two books from Albanian. 

Original publication date: March 5, 2021

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Transcript

SPEAKER_06 0:00

The language was only uh unified in nineteen seventy-two. It's only basically within my lifetime that this has been considered to be a unified language, which is why there isn't very much consensus about what is right and wrong. Unlike in English, where there's a whole worldwide industry based on what correct grammar is and what an ILT score looks like and what uh what materials can be used to teach the third conditional or whatever.

unknown 0:27

I'm here.

SPEAKER_04 0:29

Don't choose to lose.

SPEAKER_02 0:32

Hey there, this is Steph from Stefffuccio.com with another episode of Geopatz Language. We are traveling to Albania, Kosovo, and the UK today to chat with an educator, community advocate, and author about Albanian and other languages in the region. We'll tell you more about her in a minute, but first I want to mention one quick thing. As many of you know, Geopets Language is one of many podcasts that I have in the Geopets Podcast Network. In order to have one singular place where all of the information from not just all the podcasts, but podcast review day and where you can read about all of the different parts of my podcasting world, I have created a weekly newsletter that comes out on Thursdays. I'll put a link to the most current issue in the show notes for you. And you can go and sign up at Stefffuccio.com. It comes out on Thursdays. It talks about my creative process as well as product, has some inspiration, some tips, and some, you know, struggles because creativity, it's not always so easy. In this conversation, I had the pleasure of chatting with Elizabeth Gowing. She was a primary educator in inner London before moving to Kosovo in 2006. And from there she moved to Albania in 2013. And that's where I am right now. I'm in the capital of Albania, which is Tirana. And it is on one of the exped boards for Tirana that I actually met Elizabeth and started to talk about having this interview. In Kosovo, she co-founded a number of different projects, community projects, like the ideas, partnership, nonprofit. We'll talk about her community work more during this conversation. She is also the author of five travel books and has also translated two books from Albanian. We chat about all these different aspects of her life in the Balkans, which is the region that Kosovo, Albania, and some other countries are in, to language. We anchor them to language and we investigate them through the lens of language. And it was really, really fun to look at the language differences, the language cultural lessons, and so much more grounded in those language moments. If you would like to comment on this episode, I'd love to hear what you think. On Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, I am Steph Fuccio. It's S-T-E-P-H-F-U-C-C-I-O. And that is also my email address and my website address, stefffuccio.com. Alright, let's get into the conversation with Elizabeth and the many ways that she has learned, viewed, and experienced language within the region that I'm in now. Thank you so much, Elizabeth, for being on Geopaths Language Podcast. It's a pleasure. On all of the Geopats podcasts, we s try to encourage a global lens on things. So can we start out with all of the places that you have been, either for short or longer periods of time in your life?

SPEAKER_06 3:29

Well, I think I've been to 65 countries. So maybe we won't do all of the regional.

SPEAKER_02 3:34

Okay. Maybe we should talk regions then.

SPEAKER_06 3:37

Well, my father was in the Air Force, the Royal Air Force, and so I lived as a child in Germany and in Belgium and in Algeria. And then as an adult, I've lived in Kosovo, which is where I still spend most of my time. And in Albania, which is where I was spending a lot of my time with my partner's job until August this year. And then the UK, which is where I'm I'm from. So I guess my travel has been not at all in South America, very never been to South America at all. And a little bit in Asia, but far more of it in Europe and than some countries of Africa as well.

SPEAKER_02 4:14

And are you in Albania now or in Kosovo now?

SPEAKER_06 4:17

I'm actually in the UK now. I arrived two days ago. Yeah. We don't have a home in Albania anymore. Since uh August, we've we left our flat there because my partner's job finished. So although we've actually been back a few times and we've seen a few friends, and I hope and I'm sure that that will continue. And my partner has some work there and I'm on the board of a non-profit there. And so there are things that uh will keep us connected to Albania in some ways. But having tried for seven years to keep a three-way lifestyle, it's it was quite exhausting. So it's quite nice that now we're just dividing ourselves between Kosovo and the UK.

SPEAKER_02 4:51

That is quite a swift. We initially connected on, I believe, the one of the expat in Tirana Facebook groups.

SPEAKER_06 4:58

Yes, which I'm still a member of because there's still plenty that's useful to learn about.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

I was in China for a number of years, and there are a bunch of groups I'm still in there, even though I I don't have any plans to go back. But there's community that you build up that you don't want to leave just because you're geographically not there. Yeah, exactly. So 65 countries in many different regions. How about languages? What languages do you use?

SPEAKER_06 5:20

Well, I've I've got some kind of exam or proficiency in six languages, but it's not like I feel at all confident in quite a lot of them because some of those exams are a while ago. But uh so as well as native English. My French is not bad because of having lived in Belgium and in Algeria. So I can read French quite well and I can understand French reasonably. And then when I start to speak French, out comes Albanian now. Because Albanian is yeah, that's a bit weird. I think Albanian has now just become sort of foreign language. So when I try to speak a foreign language, that's what comes out. And my Albanian is pretty much fluent now. I work as a translator, and so of course I'm still learning, and pretty much every day there's a new thing, and I'm sure I make mistakes, but I'm I'm I'm completely functional in Albanian. And then I learned Serbian. I did the basic level exam in Serbian when I was living in Kosovo, when we first moved to Kosovo. And then having learnt Albanian and Serbian, I was really interested in Turkish, which is one of the languages that lot that both of those borrow a lot from. And so I did my basic level exam in Turkish a few years ago. In fact, I I did that on the bus when I was travelling back and forth between Kosovo and Albania, which was a sort of five-hour journey one way every week. So that was like 10 hours on the bus. So I um d did various uh language learning with headphones during that time. So that's how I managed to get my Turkish. And then before that, when I was in school, uh oh no, actually as a young adult, I did Italian as a like in evening classes. When I was at university, I learned Esperanto, which was just kind of for fun. And I the the British GCSEs, which was the old the exam you do kind of age 16, they were just phasing that out for Esperanto. So I was told if I wanted to get a qualification, then this is like my last year. So I uh studied for the Esperanto GCSE exam.

SPEAKER_02 7:09

I didn't realize they had that for Esperanto.

SPEAKER_06 7:11

That's well, they don't anymore. That was the last year.

SPEAKER_02 7:14

So Why did they take that away?

SPEAKER_06 7:16

Uh I guess there are not so many people speaking Esperanto.

SPEAKER_02 7:20

Okay, that's quite a mouthful. So maybe we should focus on the Albanian with some questions about Serbian and Turkish too. Maybe kind of center it around there. You learned in order Albanian, then Serbian, then Turkish.

SPEAKER_06 7:36

Yes, exactly. Uh Serbian, because obviously that's used a lot in in Kosovo. It's one of the official languages in Kosovo, and there are a minority of people who have that as their first language, so it felt like it was right to be able to speak that. And then uh Turkish is also an official language in Kosovo, but only in a few municipalities. So I think Kosovo is one of only three countries in the world that has Turkish as an official language. So there's Turkey itself, there's Cyprus, and there's Kosovo.

SPEAKER_02 8:01

And what was your initial motivation for learning Albanian in the first place?

SPEAKER_06 8:05

Wherever I go, especially if I'm planning to live there, but even if I just go on holiday, then of course you want to be able to talk to people. And people are very appreciative of that, I think, with Albanian, far more than with other languages, which are more widely spoken because so few people speak Albanian that are foreigners. I think people it it makes even more of a bond. People see it as even more of a sign of respect. And so opened up all kinds of friendships and chances to get to know people and chances to understand the country. So yeah, I knew that I would learn Albanian when when we knew we were moving there.

SPEAKER_02 8:41

Sure. Did you start learning before you moved here?

SPEAKER_06 8:44

Well, my partner was offered the job, and 10 days later our house was backed up, and then 10 days after that we were there. So it was 20 days. So I said, okay, I'm gonna learn one word a day. So I arrived in Kosovo speaking 20 words of Albanian.

SPEAKER_02 9:00

Do you remember what those 20 words were?

SPEAKER_06 9:02

Yes. So what do I remember? Uh well, I tried to be strategic about working through what I knew would I would be doing. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna we're going to be arriving in the evening. So I need to learn good evening is gonna need to be my very first word. And then we're going to need to get to the hotel, and then we're going to need to say hello and thank you, whatever. And then I remember sort of the 20th word I learnt was I was working out, okay, I'll have then I've got to breakfast and I'll need to go down to the hotel restaurant and I'll need to ask for orange juice. So I remember orange juice was was word number 20.

SPEAKER_02 9:36

As you were learning the language, did your initial ideas about Albanian culture or the Albanian people or what have you changed as you understood more of the language?

SPEAKER_06 9:47

I mean, I think language is definitely a way into people, whatever, whatever language and whatever people. Probably that's not so obvious in the very beginning. It's more when you're learning some of the sort of subtleties of the language that you start to see how what the untranslatable bits are or what the peculiarities are. And Albanian, I mean Albanian is a really fascinating language because it's uh on its own branch of the Indo-European tree of languages. So uh it doesn't have any languages like it, although it does have a lot of borrowed words. And one of the features which is not unique but it's very rare, is the admirative case of verbs, which is what's used for sorry, actually the admirative I think is unique. Sorry, it's the the other the optative, which is not unique because I know it exists in Greek as well, but it's the optative that I think is really uh interesting as a way into some of the most important bits of the Albanian kind of psyche or the things that you the the most mm significant things that you might say to somebody because the optative is what you use for blessings and also for curses. So the optatives are what you use when you sneeze, and somebody says uh they wish you shindet, which is health, which is the response to a sneeze. But in Albanian, I don't know if it's the only language, but I haven't come across any others that then have a required response from the sneezer. So not just a required response from the people with them. So you sneeze, somebody says shindet, and then you say shindet patch, which means may you have health. So you both wish wish each other health, which I mean in these times of pandemic, you know, it's actually sort of like showing how stuff spreads. It's quite interesting approach. If someone sneezes, actually you both need to be wished good health, not just the sneezer. And yeah, the same optative is used for all kinds of other little kind of ticks. So if you have your hair cut, then you're told to like may it be with good health for you. Or if you uh buy something to wear, then you'll be told exofts, like may you enjoy it. If you tell somebody your name, they will say exof, which is a slightly different form of the same verb, sort of means may you may you enjoy that name. I once had some amazing boots and a friend saw them and she said eshivchen, I think I've said that right, which means may they rip. And I didn't understand why it seemed quite a mean thing to be saying. She explained that that meant may they rip before you die. Like they're they're lovely boots, but may you outlive them, which is a kind of a nice a nice message. And then there's of course those are all the blessings, uh, but then it's the same optative that you use for curses, so all of the swear words, phrases use may you do whatever. So that's an important part of grammar to understand these really deep running parts of the of people's conversation. And then the admirative, which, like I said, is I think unique to Albanian, is the other weird case, uh weird at least to a non-Albanian speaker, which has it it has two uses, but one of them is to convey that you don't have a piece of information firsthand, that you are getting this at second hand, which is really quite an important case actually, and one that's we could probably all in these days of fake news, it would be good to know, like when you're really sure and when you're just reporting something you've been told. But it's also used to sort of show astonishment of something. So you use it if you're saying, wow, for for good or for bad. Those are the kinds of details that you don't learn those in your probably not even in your first year of learning a language, but when you do get into them, then you feel like you're really understanding some kind of secret parts of a mentality.

SPEAKER_02 13:30

That admirative one where your admirative aspect where you're talking about where you got the source of the information. Is that similar to like reported speech in English, where you're talking about like he said, she said kind of thing?

SPEAKER_06 13:43

Yes, but you just don't need to say that he said she said. So we would just I might say to you pasquarzia, which means like so if I said KRD, this would mean you came yesterday. But if I said pascaard, that means like I gather that you arrived yesterday. I don't have that for sure, but I somebody told me that you arrived yesterday.

SPEAKER_02 14:01

I see, I see, I see. So it doesn't necessarily direct it towards a specific source.

SPEAKER_06 14:05

No, no.

unknown 14:07

We are there.

SPEAKER_04 14:08

No feel CNC a par.

SPEAKER_02 14:16

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SPEAKER_03 15:50

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SPEAKER_02 16:51

So hopefully these two tools will help you with your own language learning process. As you were learning the language, were there any cultural insights that you got that surprised you, either pleasantly or otherwise, probably more so pleasantly?

SPEAKER_06 17:15

I think the bit that the thing I enjoyed, I mean it's a slightly geeky thing to enjoy, but there's this kind of there's this gender within so obviously like many languages, Albanian divides words into masculine and feminine. But there seems to be the remnants of a kind of neuter, neutral gender, because there's a whole group of words which masculine in the singular and then become feminine in the plural. So they sort of yeah, have this strange chimera kind of status. And lots of those words are the really elemental words of the language. So the words like water and wax and fat and cheese, so things that you can imagine have really come down from a very been handed down through many generations of the basics. And I kind of like learning things like that so that you get to you you feel like you're part of a a very long tradition of saying these words.

SPEAKER_02 18:07

That's interesting. Yeah, because in English a lot of words go from like female sing like singulars to plural male. So but in Albanian, there is also the opposite. Hurrah. Okay. From someone who's only been here about a month, one of the first things people mentioned about not just language, but expressing people expressing themselves was the yes and no being opposite. But from what I've seen so far, the yes is not an exact left-to-right no that we would do in English. It it's more of like a of course kind of sh head. It's hard to do this audibly, but sort of like if you're shrugging and you tilt your head at the same time. This seems to be what I'm seeing more of. Am I correct on this at all? Because I have very limited sample right now.

SPEAKER_06 18:51

I think it gets more and more emphasized the further south you go. So this issue of as you say, people will say that you nod for no and you shake for yes, but in Kosovo, that's not not always the case. And even in Tirana, it's not always the case. But further south, it does seem to get more and more obvious. And I think the best way to sort of sh to see it is if you somebody responds to a genuine yes-no question that you really don't know the answer, and they don't say a word with it, then that really tests what your instinct is to how they reply. And it's certainly very obvious sometimes that this is not just a tilt or this is not just, but you know, this is exactly what a British person would be doing to say no, but they are meaning yes. And and I'm now started in just using thumbs up and thumbs down as I as I speak, because I realize that I must be giving off very confusing signals. So I always do that when I'm speaking with somebody I don't know. I kind of reinforce it with the And that has the same meaning then.

SPEAKER_02 19:52

That's not opposite.

SPEAKER_06 19:53

Yeah, although actually in Kosovo the PDK party, which is one of the governing parties, the the thumbs up is their kind of uh particularly Hashim Thachi, the former president's what's his kind of gesture. So people it now has a slightly political kind of connotation if you give the thumbs up, which is not necessarily what I intend.

SPEAKER_02 20:11

For the Albanian spoken and used in Kosovo versus in Albania, is I imagine there's regional differences or dialectical differences. Are they very different or moderately different?

SPEAKER_06 20:23

If you go right to the south of Albania and then compare that with Kosovan Albanian, there it it can really be very different and enough to have people really struggling to understand one another. But I mean it's it is the same language. The two dialects are the Geg dialect in the north and the Tosk in the south. And one of the biggest differences is that Geg has a an infinitive and the infinitive is used to form the past and the future in Geg. Whereas in Tosk they don't have an infinitive and and so they form the the future and the past in different ways. And so that can make actually a huge difference. So for example, I will go in in Geg in Kosovo, that would be Kam Meshku. Whereas in Tosk in Albania and in the south, it would be Doteshkoi. So those three words, there are only three letters, in fact, that are shared. Dotoshkoi, Kam Sko. I mean, in fact, the rule about how you use them is really simple. Once you've learned it, you can kind of be bilingual between those. But that's just one example. And then of course there are many, many vocabulary differences, particularly Albanian, because of its history in Albania, has absorbed a lot of Italian words, both for nouns but also verbs and adjectives like the word for car and the word for blue, which is makina and blue, for example. Whereas in Kosovo you would say care for car and you would say kalter for for blue. So a totally different word. And that in its turn, Kosovo has absorbed a lot of Serbian words because uh for the last three generations Kosovo has been part of Yugoslavia or has been struggling. To be part of Yugoslavia, and so has had that Serbian connection. And so the lexical differences can be quite confusing. And even for basic things like the word for pen or the word for a tissue Kleenex, so kind of quite common nouns that you might need to ask for quite often are quite different. And genuinely, people, it's incomprehensible, people just don't know that word for it. And so I I quite often ran into that. And especially because quite a lot of my work's been with children, and so children generally have one word for one thing rather than uh it's only later that they develop uh a wider vocabulary. So yeah, it it is quite tricky. And the language was only uh unified in 1972. So I think that's really worth remembering. I mean, that's the year before I was born, and so it it's it's only basically within my lifetime that this has been considered to be a unified language, which is why there isn't very much consensus about what is right and wrong. Unlike in English, where there's a whole worldwide industry based on what correct grammar is and what an ILT score looks like and what uh what materials can be used to teach the third conditional or whatever. And Albanian really doesn't have any of that paraphronania because it's still people often look at me as I when I say something, and I can tell that I've not got it quite right, but they're definitely not correcting me. They just think, hmm, must be from a different village, or you know, that because I'm educated and they they know I've got a university education and and they feel that they haven't. Perhaps they assume that I'm right and that they're wrong because there's a lot of uncertainty about what correct means in terms of Albanian uh grammar. So that's another reason why actually learning Albanian is quite easy, because it's not like you're falling into mistakes that would be very easily identified in English as mistakes. There's people are like, okay, I understand what you're saying. It's not how I'd have put it, but you know, uh we can get along.

SPEAKER_02 23:50

And I've noticed that language flexibility from the get-go here is I've I've been in some countries where people will just try to communicate no matter what they do, whether it be hand gestures or drawings or different words, different languages, and some places where they're like, no, you have to speak this language perfectly before I understand you. And in the first day or two here, I was just like, this is amazing. Like anything that needs to be used, we're using. And because I have like two words in Albanian and they have a lot more English, and we both of us kind of recognize Italian. So I've just in simple transactions, there were different things that we were doing, but things always got done and they were always super nice about it. And I was like, this is amazing. That kind of language flexibility is beautiful.

SPEAKER_06 24:29

I think also that so many Albanians have had experience of living and working abroad. So even if probably not in an English-speaking country, but Albanians from Albania will have been in Italy or Greece, and people from Kosovo will have been in Germany or Switzerland and sometimes in the UK. And so people have had that experience of having to get by in a foreign language. So that gives you a tolerance and a flexibility uh for when other people are struggling.

SPEAKER_02 24:54

And you had mentioned your your work with children. Can you tell us more about that? Because I from what I heard last night in an interview I was listening to, you went from possibly teaching one student to teaching a whole classroom full of like 20 some students.

SPEAKER_06 25:08

Yeah, and I think we've now got over 600 kids uh into school now. So yeah, I'm the co-founder of the Ideas Partnership, which is charity uh nonprofit that works in Kosovo. And I'm a teacher by training. But as you say, I it wasn't that I set out to through the Ideas Partnership to do a particular project or to to do this project on education, but just by chance I met this one girl who uh was nine at the time and who wanted to go to school, and the school wasn't allowing her to come because they said she was too late to register that after the age of nine you'd you'd missed your chance. So I was battling to try to change that uh ruling because clearly in Kosovo and the constitution and terms of children's rights, of course, they have the right to education until the age of 16. But I also wanted to teach her and get her to be able to fit in in the classroom. And then, as you say, she said, Can my friends come? And then before we we had this classroom full of kids. And I mean that was 10 years ago, but we've now continued um the work in Fushkosov, which is the suburb of Prishtina where that girl lived. And we're now in three other municipalities as well. And in fact, we've expanded our projects to as soon as we got to know the community, we learnt all kinds of other needs, including very high child mortality. So we now have a newborn maternal health programme. We also have a kindergarten and not just support for school kids, we support adults who want to go back to education, whether that's with basic literacy or going to high school or evening classes to get their high school diploma or whatever. So we've now got really quite a large, rich, rich sort of portfolio of ways of helping people to help themselves out of that that poverty. But yes, it has meant that uh almost all of my work now is with people who are not uh formally educated and so don't have English, but also don't have necessarily grammatical Albanian, and it's mixed in with bits of Serbian and Turkish and bits of Roma language as well, because um some of these families are from the Roma community. And so it's definitely enriched my vocabulary and forced me to get better at Albanian.

SPEAKER_02 27:12

It's still just children that you're teaching now, those 600?

SPEAKER_06 27:17

Uh well, 600 children we've got into school, but our center, our biggest centre, which is in Fushkosov, we have about 300 people who come through the doors every week. And so most of those are children, but also we have these mum's literacy classes, and we have I also run a social enterprise, so there are 12 women who are employed through that, and they earn money from the sales of greetings cards and purses and bookmarks and bags and things they make, but on condition that their children go to school. So we're trying to break this cycle where those kids more often were going out through the rubbish, collecting garbage for recycling, or they were uh begging, and so they weren't in school, and so of course, then when they grow up, they don't have the qualifications to be able to do anything else, and their own kids could then go through the garbage and go out begging. So we're trying to break that by using those women as the agents for change in their families and in their communities.

SPEAKER_02 28:15

Speaking of bookmarks, you are also a writer and an avid reader. I'm laughing because there's so many different aspects of your life that fit into so many of my different podcasts that I'm just like so. Yes, you are a writer. You have six books. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_06 28:31

Yeah, five books. Yeah, I'm working on the six, but five of them. Oh, that was it.

SPEAKER_02 28:35

I was I was mentally thinking about is there a language component or a language thread that runs through all of the books?

SPEAKER_06 28:42

Uh well, my first book is called Travels in Blood and Honey. And the subtitle is Becoming a Beekeeper in Kosovo. So on my first birthday in Kosovo, I was given this beehive as a gift, and so through that I learned how to make honey and how to look after the bees. But also I got to know a lot of these traditions of the villages and got to learn the rhythms of the land, and it got me out of the capital and into a very more traditional part of Kosovo. So it was a really transformational presence. It wasn't not just because of the honey, but because of the experiences it led to. And so my my book describes that experience. But each chapter I identified uh one or two words that I had learnt in the course of what I narrated in the chapter. And so each chapter has at the beginning just like the focus, new word, and then most of them in Albanian, but a few um Serbian words because I as I was starting to learn Serbian. So that's also something that's my love of language, I suppose, was flagged up there. And and lots of people who've read the book have told me they really enjoyed feeling like they were being educated by just learning a new word every chapter. And I have a podcast myself with my partner Rob called A Coffee in the Accursed Mountains, which is about life and culture with stories from Kosovo and Albania and Montenegro, which are the countries around these so-called accursed mountains. That's the name of the mountain range. And so in A Coffee in the Accursed Mountains, in each episode we identify, you know, what's the the word of the of this episode because we could see that people enjoyed just that bit of uh of learning about a culture through its vocabulary.

SPEAKER_02 30:18

Absolutely. Yeah, I found your podcast the the first week that I was here when I started getting obsessed with mountain tea. And I've been trying to find the northern version because the southern version is the one with the yellow leaves, right?

SPEAKER_05 30:30

That's what I mean.

SPEAKER_02 30:31

Yeah, so I've been drinking that obsessively. I've now got my husband hooked on it, and we not only make it but we cook it. We leave it on the because one of the waitresses told us if you actually cook it and leave it on the stove on low heat for a long time, the flavor comes out more. So we'll leave it on the stove all day and just keep adding hot water to it. So we literally cook it all day, and I'm obsessed with it. But I want to try the northern one at some point. Is is there a huge difference between the two taste-wise?

SPEAKER_06 30:55

Yes, yeah, completely. It's an entirely different flower. So the southern one is this plant called Sideritis, and the northern one is margarine, basically, or or oregano that you would as you call it in America. So the flavor is very different, but both delicious. And I think we I mean people c make all kinds of claims for the for both kinds of mountain tea, for being good for your immunity and being good for chest complaints and for balancing your hormones. And I I think I've read elsewhere, so not just about the tea, but in general, that marjoram or oregano is good for skin. So definitely the women up in the mountains have the most beautiful skin, and well after the age that's down in the towns, it's everybody's getting wrinkly. Maybe have this one. I think it's worth drinking for that.

SPEAKER_02 31:42

So going back to books for a second, you do also read in multiple languages. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_06 31:47

Well, I try to have a few books on the go at any one time. I try to have some poetry and a book, a sort of trashy novel and a kind of good literature. And then I've usually got one on Kindle and one on audio as well. And I always try to have one in a foreign language as well. And generally that's uh Albanian, although occasionally I read French books, but Albanian is it's really useful for me to be building that. This year I have read far less because of the pandemic. I was doing a lot of my reading on as I was traveling and haven't been doing that travelling. But uh last year I read 57 books and and seven of them were Albanian, and that was that's definitely a record, so I felt very proud of that.

SPEAKER_02 32:27

Are any of your books written in or translated into Albanian?

SPEAKER_06 32:31

No, one of them is being translated, but I don't know, it's taking quite a long time, so I'm not sure when it'll be out now. Uh yeah, my second book is uh called Edith and I on the trail of an Edwardian traveller in Kosovo, and it's about Edith Durham, who is a British woman who was a British woman from a hundred years ago, who is very well known in Kosovo and Albania. There are schools named after her and roads named after her, and she was the first woman to appear on a Kosovan stamp, but in England no one has heard of her. So it's a very strange situation that you have somebody who is British but is not known in her own country. And I wanted to follow the journeys that she made the turn of the 20th century around Kosovo and Albania, and then compare what my experiences were with hers. And so there is a publishing house who've started to translate that, but it's been going on for some time, so it might be a while before it comes out in Albanian.

SPEAKER_02 33:26

Do you think you'll ever want to write a book in Albanian as you're writing it at first, not just translating it afterwards?

SPEAKER_06 33:33

Yeah, I I definitely haven't got to that stage yet. I um I used to have a column in the Pristina Insight, which is the English language uh newspaper in Kosovo that published by Beer in the investigative Balkan investigative reporting network. And that had to be done in English and Albanian because they have uh an Albanian language version. And so I was always kind of daring myself to write it first in Albanian. But I I think possibly the more the more important it is to you to communicate carefully, the more likely it is that you will want to write in your native language, because there you've obviously you've got the most flexibility, you've got the widest vocabulary. English anyway has a wider vocabulary than Albanian does. So I think it's it sort of feels like trying to dance with your feet tied together. Why would you do that? If you when you can write exactly what you mean, and then you can work out how to say it in a different language. But it would be nice. Uh I had my first dream in Albanian just over a year ago. So I mean that took me twelve and some years to get so maybe my my next goal is to write something in Albanian first. I mean, emails and those kinds of things. Of course I write in Albanian first, but when you're wanting to choose your words really carefully and get your message really honed, like I do in my books or in a newspaper article, then I don't know, it hasn't worked for me yet to do it in Albanian first.

SPEAKER_02 34:54

When you're using English and when you're using Albanian, do you feel differently in the different languages?

SPEAKER_06 35:00

Definitely. Well, people say that I talk much faster in Albanian, which is interesting, I guess, because I think Albanians talk faster. And so and I do love, like when I've been in England for a while, yesterday I ran a whole day of training in Albanian all day on Zoom. So I I guess nowadays I'm actually using a lot of Albanian even when I'm in the UK. I remember there being times when I'd been in the UK for a a stay, and I hadn't used spoken Albanian at all in that time. And then just getting to the airport and doing those first bits of communication with the border officials or with taxi drivers or whatever, just enjoying the feel of it in my mouth that it was back to something that felt comfortable. So I guess there is a there's a thrill in using the language, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:47

There's always some words, it seems, that are more suitable or more specific or more apt for a sp situation or a thing than in in some languages than in others. Are there any Albanian words that you intend to use even when you're speaking in English, or slip into that word because it just exactly fits that thing?

SPEAKER_06 36:08

Yeah, definitely. Although, like I said earlier, English has a wider vocabulary than Albanian does, mainly because English borrows from so many languages, and Albanian has borrowed a lot less. There are some places where Albanian has a wider range of options, and then one that often comes up for me is words for support. And in English, we don't really have more than one way of saying support. And I I talk about support a lot because of the work of our non-profit, and so I'm constantly asking people for support or thanking them for their support or and often in Facebook posts, which I quite often do in two languages, and in uh English, as I say, we can just say support, which comes, I guess, from that the idea of being something from underneath the sub. And Albanian has two words, one of which is embishtetia, which does have this sense of a kind of vertical being supported from beneath, but it also has the word perkrah here, which literally breaks down as being by your arm. So it's kind of like shoulder-to-shoulder support. And I really like the fact that there's the idea is I'm not sure that there is a difference in the usage between the two, but one could um sort of see that sometimes you're supported by somebody actually holding you up, and sometimes you're supported by someone who's there at your side.

SPEAKER_02 37:23

I never thought of that before, but there are those differences, but we don't have that distinction.

SPEAKER_06 37:28

So yes, I really like the flexibility to do that. And then I think uh a word that I do use quite often, just because I love the sound of it. In fact, it's a Turkish word, but it's been taken into Albanian, is uh kalabaluk, which is such a nice word to say, which just means a lot of people or a crowd. Um, or you could use it on the roads, you could say that there's a you know a lot of traffic. And so yeah, this one is a nice word to say.

SPEAKER_02 37:50

That is a fun one to say. That's a nice mouthfeel. Kal kalagaluk, is that it? Kalagaluk. I like kalak. I heard years and years ago when I lived in Vietnam, I heard from somebody who was a native French speaker that there was this word that meant like if you're done eating, like you're full, but you want one more bite just because the flavor is so good, there's a word for that in French. And we don't have that in English. And I'd never I I don't I don't know French at all, but I the fact that that existed, I was like, that tells you something about the cuisine.

SPEAKER_05 38:23

Yeah, yeah, great, great card.

SPEAKER_02 38:25

So I I think that the different support vocabulary tells you something about Albanian culture as well.

SPEAKER_06 38:30

Definitely, yeah. The and the sort of solidarity that there is in different families.

SPEAKER_02 38:35

That's beautiful. Thank you. Where can people find you online? What's the best place for them to go?

SPEAKER_06 38:39

So my website is a good one-stop shop. So that's elisabethgowing.com. And there you'll there's a link to our podcast, uh Coffee in the Accursed Mountains. There's also a page with information about my books, and you can buy the books from there. And there's also links to the work of our charity, The Ideas Partnership, which is on there. But I'm also on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, and so it's always nice to join out with people in those places too.

SPEAKER_02 39:09

Thank you so much to Elizabeth for taking the time to have this conversation about languages. It was so interesting to have this conversation with her when I first got to Albania and to listen to it again while I was editing it for this. It was fun to hear, uh it was fun to hear my own impressions of the language a few months later. Thank you also to German Uncovered and Online Language Exchange for the information about those two wonderful resources for learning languages. Finally, thank you to Damon Castillo, who is the voice that you're hearing in all of the music that has been on this episode so far. Stick around, the full song will be at the end of this episode in just a minute. This episode is brought to you by stefffuccio.com, where offer custom podcasting services and podcast consulting services. Again, you can go to stefffuccio.com, S-T-E-P-H-F-U-C-C-I-O for more information on that. We'll be back in two weeks with our second episode focusing on the Albanian language. This is so exciting. Alright, bye.

SPEAKER_04 40:19

Ain't it sad that you've never seen just how beautiful life can be in fact?

unknown 40:30

If I had to make a call, I'd say you never see yourself at all. Just a flop here and a flop there when you're standing in your underwear.

SPEAKER_04 40:58

But I can see you alone in a room. Wearing nothing but some sweet perfume. That's why I'm here if you don't choose to lose. Get you done with the light. See yourself to my eyes, you pay your dues. Say goodbye.

unknown 41:42

You'll buy the blue. That you wanna be free. From the shackles, don't move, squat me. And that's the work, and then I have to propose.

SPEAKER_04 42:02

You leave the prison of your pretty clothes. That's why I'm here.

unknown 42:11

Don't choose to lose. You'll buy the boots.

SPEAKER_04 42:22

Where you don't have and you don't even know it. Girl, I love what you got. Gonna teach you to show it. If you're done with the light, see yourself goodbye. You pay your dues. Say goodbye to your Friday blues. We're there. No fear because I'm since they apart. I'm just a gun still. So hot and you don't even know it. Girl, I love what you got. Gonna need to show it. If you don't get the light, see yourself too bad. You pay your dues. Say goodbye. Your body blue.

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