Since relocating to London in 2012, Lindsay Lohan has made considerable strides to become a true citizen of the world, a place where she currently has no outstanding warrants. In recent years, she’s become interested in transcendental meditation and the teachings of Deepak Chopra, and displayed an open mind toward being photographed with the Quran. She became an unlikely, if slightly incoherent voice of reason amid the Brexit fiasco, and more recently she’s been working with Syrian refugees in Turkey, bringing them much-needed hope and energy drinks. Those endless months of being a voice for international concerns have since taken literal root: Linday Lohan now speaks in an accent of indeterminate origin—an Accent Without Borders, one that is everywhere and nowhere at once.
Lohan’s lingua what-the-franca first began making itself known in October, after an interview on Turkish TV in which the Long Island native intermittently strayed into a sort-of French Mediterranean lilt that suggested Marion Cotillard had stepped in to play her. But yesterday, the internet caught wind of another interview filmed around the same time, one that suggested that Thomas Friedman’s dream of globalization has, at long last, been realized within Lindsay Lohan’s throat.
Lohan was haltingly speaking outside the opening of her new nightclub, LOHAN, in Athens, Greece—a club that Lohan views as both a celebratory tribute to Syrian refugees, as well as, like Lohan’s own voice, a place where myriad cultures can be thrown together in a haze of cigarette smoke and Red Bull. And while Lohan shared an important message about how she wasn’t letting her nightclubbing past muddle her work on behalf of Syria by opening a nightclub, that message was, unfortunately lost in an accent that skipped lightly across British, French, Turkish, Greek, and “visiting alien dignitary on Star Trek” intonations. Throughout, Lohan also employed a broken English peppered with various “umms” and “ahhhs” that stopped just short of adding “How you say…?” It was cross-cultural and whiplash-inducing, like an Epcot Center ride piloted by Lindsay Lohan.
When The Daily Mail asked her why she no longer sounded like the Lohan of prematurely old, Lohan joked, “Je ne sais pas” (French for “I know a little French”), then explained:
It’s a mixture of most of the languages I can understand or am trying to learn. I’ve been learning different languages since I was a child. I’m fluent in English and French can understand Russian and am learning Turkish, Italian, and Arabic.
It’s true: Lohan has indeed shown off some of her Arabic while barking at paparazzi, and as most of her Instagram posts have demonstrated, her English is so impeccable, she typically only requires as few as four hashtags and emojis to communicate. But this new, Tower of Babble dialect is unique, prompting Lohan to suggest it might even need its own name:
@DailyMailUK what should I call my new accent? I’m thinking #LILOHAN
— Lindsay Lohan (@lindsaylohan) November 1, 2016
However, before any linguistics professors could add “#LiLohan” to their lesson plans before walking calmly into the ocean, Lohan told The Daily Mail, “We should let the people decide” what to call it. After all, humanity strives every day for its own self-determination, as proudly, defiantly resistant to oppression as a nightclub. Let us continue to waste some of that on figuring out what the fuck Lindsay Lohan is saying.