The Enunciative Parrot
The Enunciative Parrot is a party game for inadvertent polyglots that blends language, mimicry, and deduction. Think Pictionary x Charades x Broken Telephone, but with foreign-language tongue-twisters. Blue Team and Red Team take turns incarnating the roles of The Parrot and The Birdwatcher. The Parrot is sent a randomized tongue-twister from a shortlist of five languages, as pre-selected by the opposing team from a bank of 24 tongue-twisters. This selection is based on the assumptions made about the nominated Parrot’s ability to replicate sound in a given set of languages. The Parrot listens to the tongue-twister for a minute and then has to imitate whatever sounds they can recall. The Birdwatcher must then decide which language the Parrot was speaking, of the shortlisted five. Three wrong answers (strikes) means the opposing team takes centre-stage. A correct answer means a point and a continuation of the scoring team’s round. The team with the most points, wins. Like Twister, the game is at its most joyfully absurd when failed at completely. We can’t help but laugh at ourselves when our attempts at verbal communication degenerates into a spluttering mess of repetitive sound. We delight in hearing other’s attempts to mimic the hardest phrases in our own languages. The game is about collectively sharing in, and laughing with, the simple pleasure of our mutually-recognizable failures. It is also a game about the assumptions we make about our abilities to mimic each other’s languages, usually based on our appearances. The subversion of those assumptions is glorious fun.
