31. ‘Whatever Floats Your Boat’
Hard to explain in English but here goes and it’s one of mine:
In Belgium, there are two dialects that get ridiculed the most, one of the coastal province ‘West Vlaams’ and another ‘Limburgs’. I speak the latter.
At a festival, I started chatting with a girl next to me who spoke ‘West Vlaams’. She immediately started making fun of my accent. At first, I kinda ignored it but it kept coming up so we started to have a discussion about it.
‘Limburgs’ is quite a slow dialect so people say everyone who speaks it is dumb. I said we actually speak slowly because it makes it easy to understand. While ‘West Vlaams’ is more like grunting vowels which no one will understand and sounds primitive. She kept dissing Limburgs so I just acted like I didn’t understand anything she was saying because of her dialect. At which point she said in English: ‘whatever floats your boat’. To which I acted surprised and responded: ‘Hey I understood that! .. because it was in English’.
She burst into laughter and was a good sport about it. The dialect didn’t come up afterwards.