If you go down to the pits today, you’re sure of a big surprise. At least, that’s what I’ve found on my visits to Santa Pod Raceway’s FIA European Championship races. The place is jam full of people from other countries!!

So I figured it was time I don my investigative-journalist hat and go sniff out some facts.

I’ve come across recent visitors to the track from Canada, America and Australia, all murmuring away in their own, parochial versions of the English tongue, and they’re usually well-enough understood. Paradoxically more difficult, for a cultivated chap from the Home Counties, are those folk who come down from Yorkshire and Lancashire, whose lingo, it must be said, is sometimes a little hard to grasp. Quite a surprise, there, eh? Well, not really. Luckily, not many show up from places like Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Glasgow!

The traditional British method of communicating with foreigners – just speak louder – doesn’t really work at a dragstrip, since you are usually yelling at the top of your voice anyway just to make yourself heard, whoever it is you are trying to talk to.

And then there’s writing. The saving grace of written English is its lack of accented letters. We don’t have to bother with all those dots, dashes and curlicues which so often pepper a page of foreign-language prose, not to mention those slanty little lines posted above – and sometimes even through! – perfectly serviceable letters of the alphabet.

The name Åsa Kinnemar illustrates the point. It looks simple enough at first sight; then you notice that niggling little ‘o’ lurking on top of the capital A. Email Speedgroup’s administrator on an English keyboard and she becomes a complicated process: “Hi, Number Lock on / hold down Alt key / type ‘143’ on the numeric keypad / release Alt key / Number Lock off / type ‘s’ / type ‘a’.”

Back in the 1920s there was a famous American singer named Asa ( known as Al) Jolson, and a Scottish footballer in the 1970s, Asa Hartford. Both of them managed to sport their capital A’s without adornments, but then again, they were both men, and probably wouldn’t have recognised a dragster if it had run over them. So maybe this, like much else in life, proves nothing.

Scandinavia is an interesting place, as it happens, noted for the warmth of its people in contrast to the chill of its climate. Danes, Norwegians and Swedes can all get the gist of what each other is on about, owing to a common Germanic root to all their languages. Not so with Finnish, unintelligible to everyone save, perhaps, for a few erudite Hungarians.

Top Motoring Writer, Todd Teasdale.

Head to the distant, southern end of Europe, however, and the weather warms up but the language business gets yet more arcane, at least in small pockets.

Pro Mod racer Jean Dulamon has to haul his trailer all the way to Santa Pod from the furthest south-western corner of France – Basque country! Indeed, Jean’s mother is herself Basque, so he ought to know a thing or two.

(I try out my schoolboy French.)

“S’il vous plaît, Jean, comment dit-on ‘drag racing’ en Basque?”
“On dit ‘drag racing’.”

Stands to reason really. The Basque language (officially Euskara) is classified as a ‘language isolate’, the last remaining descendant of the pre-Indo-European languages of Western Europe. It’s unlikely they had a word to describe the drags in pre-historic times.

Further south still, and even hotter, there’s Malta, land of the legendary pit party!! And didn’t those Maltese have a Wow! of a weekend in September? While famed Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja was Wowing! music fans at the Royal Albert Hall’s Last Night Of The Proms, famed Maltese drag racers Manty Bugeja and Chris Polidano were busy Wowing! the Santa Pod fans at the European Finals. Bugeja beat Polidano in the Top Methanol Dragster final and carried off the European championship into the bargain. And yes, music and dancing really did Wow! the denizens of the pits afterwards, though I don’t suppose Joseph Calleja got a look-in.

If it could be heard over the disco beats, the party banter would have been in Malti, the language of Malta. Once, people thought it was descended from Carthaginian (!). In fact it originates from Arabic, and is the only Semitic language officially written in a Latin alphabet. As befits an island that lies at the crossroads of the ancient world, it has borrowed widely from the numerous other languages that have passed its way – a bit like English, really.

Head north once more and we arrive at the Netherlands, a generally more temperate place. The Dutch language seems blissfully free of accents but, instead, it has those long, compound words and throat-clearing consonants. Brits shouldn’t have much trouble saying the name ‘Ton Pels’, but how about ‘Marc Meihuizen’? To us, the Pro Mod ace has long been Marc May-hwee-zen, but is this correct? Well, best ask a Dutchman. Better still, ask the Dutchman himself.

“Hey, Marc, how do you pronounce your name?”
“Marc.”
“Er… right. What I meant was, how do you pronounce your surname?”
“Ah, I see. Meihuizen.”
“My-how-zen?”
“That’s right. Meihuizen.”

So there you have it. To a Dutchman, it’s Meihuizen, to a Brit, Myhowzen. Isn’t language wonderful? Really wish I’d learnt some more of it at school.

Roll on 2013, I say. Can’t wait to find what fresh pack of linguistic wonders the new season springs on us.

Tagalog, anyone? Sinhala?