#i'm so done with everyone shitting on eastern europeans whether consciously or not

[iustusetpeccator]

Viktor Krum meta: language use & accent

Before I even start in earnest, I just wanna say this is particular to my interpretation of Viktor and comes with all my hangups as a Bulgarian person living in Brexit Britain; also it got pretty long. But if you like some light sociocultural analysis along with your meta, by all means read on.

So we all know how Rowling chose to represent Viktor—quiet, grumpy, slightly bumbling, and when he does speak, not particularly articulate. He does have a decent vocabulary range, but his accent is harsh and noticeable. He is also shown to speak in present continuous tense, as seen here:

‘Vell, ve have a castle also, not as big as this, nor as comfortable, I am thinking,’ he was telling Hermione. ‘Ve have just four floors, and the fires are lit only for magical purposes. But ve have grounds larger even than these – though in vinter, ve have very little daylight, so ve are not enjoying them. But in summer ve are flying every day, over the lakes and the mountains –’

Here’s an example from DH, where you can see he still has the accent, but also the (not bad) range of vocabulary he’s given, as well as his correct use of prepositions:

‘He retired several years ago. I vos one of the last to purchase a Gregorovitch vand. They are the best – although I know, of course, that you Britons set much store by Ollivander.’

I'm here to explain why I do it (a little) differently.

First of all, let me lay some groundwork. He was born in the mid-seventies in Bulgaria, which at the time was part of the Eastern Bloc. I'm going to refrain from talking about the ramifications of that on our culture, but keep in mind we were very much in bed with the Soviet Union during his formative years. Furthermore, he went to Durmstrang—a school known for accepting pupils from a very wide geographical range, seeing as it's located somewhere ‘in the far north of Europe’ and yet accepted Viktor, from way down in southeastern Europe. Either he was exceptional, or it's a pretty multicultural school.

So what does that tell us? Well, to begin with, the boy is more than likely to have been fluent in at least, AT LEAST, three languages: Bulgarian, which was his native language, of course; Russian, which was a mandatory subject from an early age in school (even if he didn’t go to muggle school, he would’ve had to speak it to avoid rousing suspicion), and which is relatively easy for a fellow Slavic language speaker to learn and retain; and either German or one of the Scandinavian languages, which he would've been taught in while at Durmstrang. At minimum.

At the same time, the Triwizard Tournament would've presented Viktor's first serious brush with the English-speaking world. English was not taught in school at the time (see also: Cold War); if you picked up a second foreign language (on top of Russian, which basically didn't count), it would be either German or French, due to long-standing sociocultural ties (i.e. our intelligentsia were largely educated in France, and we sided with Germany in both world wars; don't ask). So unless his family went out of their way to teach him English, which they would've had no reason to as it wasn't seen as useful, he wouldn't have learned it formally at any stage.

How do I know all this? Well, I’m Bulgarian for one, and also my parents are only 5-10 years older than Viktor would be. They speak, or at some point have spoken, 4-5 languages between them, of which English isn’t one. In order to study it back in the 70s and 80s, you’d have had to go to a special school that was difficult to get into, and not hugely popular either.

So yes, his spoken English was clumsy in GoF when he was 18, and he probably never lost the accent, but 1) his written English was likely much better (see also: exchanging letters with Hermione for years), and 2) his mastery of the language will have improved pretty rapidly once he made friends who spoke it. The level you see in GoF, animated discussions with Hermione and all, is his default level without having studied English in any capacity, so to think it would stay that way into his adult years is not doing the man justice.

Also him using present continuous at any stage instead of simple present tense makes no sense, considering it’s 1) more complex, and 2) does not exist in Bulgarian, his native language. So I’m not even engaging with that.

Anyway, how has all this informed the way I write him? For one, I mostly focus on the post-SWW period, when he’s: 

travelled quite widely in connection with his international career, making a lot of friends from different countries;

been pen-pals with Hermione and kept in touch with Fleur for a number of years;

chosen to settle in the UK in the aftermath of the war.

What all this means is that he’s had a lot more practice reading, writing, and speaking in English, and his words are likely to flow a lot more smoothly, as well as picking up some colloquialisms from his teammates. As for his accent, not doing the whole ‘vos’ thing is a very conscious choice. I don’t shy from a phonetic accent (see also: Alastor), but on the one hand, that’s not what my accent sounds like so I find it hard to reproduce, and two, I think it’s borderline comical, tbh. Also it makes him sound like Otto von Chriek, but that’s neither here nor there.

What I do instead is, I try and limit his vocabulary and the length of his sentences. I’m aware my command of English is above and beyond what he’s likely to attain, so I don’t make him sound like me. I mess up the odd tense and preposition, throw in the odd expression that doesn’t exist in English, make him pause and think a lot about what he says, etc. And that’s it, folks. That’s how actual Bulgarian people speak English. Compared to the other languages he’s fluent in, it’s really not a difficult one to pick up.

What I’m trying to put across here is that the whole stereotype of Eastern Europeans being stupid and bad at English in itself is really harmful. For my American friends who may not be aware of European power dynamics, we are some of the latest additions to the EU and have received tons of backlash from western Europe. Polish, Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants have been racialised by the media, particularly in the UK, and written off as cheap labour/benefit fraudsters. Hell, a lot of people who campaigned and voted for Brexit directly blame us for a lot of the UK’s issues, like the state of the National Health Service (actually due to Conservative party cuts under the guise of austerity) and a poor job market (driven by a shitty fucking economy, and not at all helped by the nearly inevitable Brexit-related recession that’s on its way).

If you want to know more about why that's a massive issue, just hmu, I can go on for days, but in terms of Viktor, I refuse to perpetuate JKR’s subconscious biases against Eastern Europeans by making him sound like some sort of illiterate idiot in my own writing. He was Durmstrang's champion, and as such we have to assume he was reasonably intelligent. Quiet, reserved, lacking confidence in his language skills, nervous around Hermione—definitely. Stupid and bumbling, not so much.