Soccer Became A Multilingual Game

I didn’t think that people watching soccer or playing soccer had a language of their own, that was until this podcast. It is not really a new language but the use of imaginative language to express skills and actions. Slowly over time more of these names keep popping up until there was whole vocab of soccer words. Tom Williams as introduced by Patrick Cox, use some of the semantics he has learned from each different country to describe what he means when he says “Do you Speak Football”. Such as, when he talks about how in French there is a word for when the ball is kicked through between someone's legs. However, such a word does not exist in English and if directly translated from French it would mean little bridge. These connotative meaning in soccer is not limited to French but other countries with their own terminology.

Another really interesting thing was that we Americans would incorporate these words into our vocabulary by trying to pronounce certain skill names in English. Patrick points out that our vocabulary is not exactly complete. This means our language is still developing and that we will continue to come up with new words or use words similar to other languages. The podcaster also points out the unique way we communicate through the internet. It was implied in the beginning that Television influence and changes our perception of others, events, and setting. Just like televisions, the internet has become a large influence too but, unlike television, the internet becomes a place to make new ideas spread further and faster. Just like Tom’s example of a well known Dutch freestyle soccer player, who took a video of a skill he came up with and called it the mousetrap. What Tom was trying to get at was that new forms of play which, are uploaded onto YouTube could be spread and incorporate into other countries and the word for that particular skill could become common to people around the world. Also because of the internet people don’t have to make up new skills or names during the games anymore.

Now the internet is waiting for new skills they have created to really be used and spread. Patrick comments on something fascinating and it was the way people can differentiate strategies even with the different language and word. An example from the podcast that I can think of is the Protegiest strategy called "Walking on Papers", it is similar to the British strategy called "Key Stone Cobbs". Even though they’re called differently they are same strategies.

Lastly, each language has their own unique style and names for the soccer world as repeat and the mass majority of the internet is still waiting for their chance to show the rest of the world more soccer discoveries. Our language is not complete and will continue to grow and expand. This means that we will never actually stop making new words up or, use our imaginative language skills to make English sounding names from other countries. Russian-speaking New Yorker would rather her daughter learn Chinese.