Multilingualism: The Gift That Keeps on Giving
Lisa Anderson | Lisa’s Dolce Italia
"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart."
Nelson Mandela
Hello!
Image | Daniel Romero, Unsplash
It is estimated that 43% of the world’s population is bilingual and 17% is multilingual. There are two days a year that celebrate being multilingual: International Mother Language Day (February 21st) and The International Day of Multilingualism (March 27th). The Former was created by the United Nations in 1999 because every two weeks, as the cultural elders pass away, a language disappears, taking with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage. Around 43% of the estimated 6000 languages in the world are believed to be endangered. Only a few hundred languages have been given a place in education systems and the public domain, and fewer than a hundred are used in the digital world. International Mother Language Day is observed every year to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.
The International Day of Multilingualism is not yet an official day, but there’s a movement by linguists and bilingual households to recognize the importance of being multilingual. 27th March 196 BCE is the date engraved on the Rosetta Stone, which was the key to decoding Egyptian hieroglyphs, therefore playing a significant role in the history of languages. #multilingualisnormal
My mother’s parents both grew up in the USA with foreign-born parents (Russian and Italian) who spoke very little English. However, at home, my grandparents were expected to speak English, and aside from a few words, never learned their parents’ mother-tongues, which were actually dialects rather than the formal language. The idea behind this was integration, and while it worked, they lost a lot of their culture.
You might be surprised to know that my husband was raised with the same idea in Italy. Italian wasn’t widely spoken in Italy until the 1960s. His parents both had the equivalent of 5th-grade educations, but their native language was Piemontese, which is more like French than Italian. His parents spoke their dialect at home, but Mauro and his sister were expected to speak Italian. Sadly, neither of them speaks Piemontese very well, and this is exactly why so many of the world’s languages are endangered. Now we know better, or do we?
I think that one of the greatest gifts I have given my children is the ability to speak two languages, although, of course, I am really only responsible for one of them: English. My husband has given them Italian and a little bit of the local dialect as well.
When I was pregnant with my first son, I read all sorts of things about raising children to be bilingual. Many people said that it would take longer for them learn to speak or that they might be confused, but other research showed me that children have an amazing ability to learn multiple languages. They seem to soak it up like sponges, and there is research that supports the theory that bilingual children’s neurons fire more quickly.
I wanted to teach my children English for both selfish and practical reasons: so that they would be able to speak with my family, and quite frankly, simply because English is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. What better gift to give them: the ability to communicate with the world! Actually, any second language is a gift, even if not widely spoken. The more exposure anyone has to other languages and cultures, the broader their outlook on life and the world.
"Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things."
Flora Lewis
Like many Americans, I did not learn to speak a foreign language until I was a teenager. My first attempt, German, was a disaster. I was in Junior High, probably the worst possible age for learning a language (or anything else for that matter), and Herr Baker and I did not get along. I managed to somehow eke out a passing grade during my two years of German, and can confidently count to twenty, say ja und nein, please, and thank you. I can also order a beer, but that was not part of our middle school curriculum: I learned to do that while traveling in my 20s.
In high school, after having had such a miserable experience with German, I decided Spanish would be my language of choice, but after two years, my comprehension of this language was on a par with my German: ¡nada!
Inspired by friends who had already moved abroad, one of my goals when I packed my bags to move to Italy was to learn to speak the language. I was a failure in the classroom, but I was quite sure I could figure it out if I immersed myself in the culture. Happily, I was right! It was not an instant process, and it was made harder by the fact that I was teaching English full time and didn't have the money to take Italian lessons.
On Friday nights I would hang out with my ex-pat friends and relish speaking my mother tongue. That was the night my brain would get to rest. The remainder of the week, I immersed myself in Italian and would lie awake for hours at night conjugating verbs in my head. Armed with a Berlitz book, I studied on my own.
Saturday nights were spent with my new Italian friends who helped me along and were super fun to hang out with. They spoke enough English to help me understand when I was stuck, had a great deal of patience, and were open minded. Willie, Cappe, Enrico and their gang of friends will never know how thankful I was (and still am) for their friendship and patience. I rarely see them anymore, since life is busy for all of us.
Learning to speak another language can also provide some laughs if you are not afraid to put yourself out there. One of the things I have noticed over the years is that people fear making mistakes and clam up even if they are capable of basic communication. We all make mistakes and with luck, we learn from them.
One of the funniest mistakes I ever made in Italian came after living here for about five months. The language school I was teaching at had closed for the summer, so I was out of work for a couple of months. Earning only 10,000 lire (roughly $5.00) an hour, I was burning through my bank account, and the thought of having no income at all was daunting. A friend, Graziella, came to the rescue—or at least tried to. She knew a family who wanted an English-speaking nanny for the summer.
I should have just said no. I have never been a babysitter and have great respect for people who work with kids. That would not be me, and really wasn't me in my late 20s, but I took the job anyway.
The family I went to live with was a Fiat executive and his trophy wife whose names I no longer remember. The wife had two kids from her first marriage who did not live with them, and the first word her 12-year-old son said to me when I had the pleasure of meeting him was in English and started with the letter F. Lovely child!
At home, she had a terrible two-year-old who was to be my charge. She did no house- work and didn't have a job, but instead had someone in to clean and someone else to iron. She sat around all day reading novels and chain-smoking. Around two hours before her husband was due home, she would disappear into her bedroom and get all dolled up.
She didn't do anything with her son, no reading, no games, or even coloring, but because she was there, he certainly didn't want to play with a strange woman who didn't even speak his own language.
He would, though, play with me while his mother puffed and read, and there were times I managed to get him to shriek with laughter. While momentarily satisfying for both of us, we didn't bond. How could we?
After two of the most miserable weeks of my life, I called it quits, but I learned a couple of important things during the experience. First, I would never choose to work with children again, and second, I learned how to order prosciutto...or rather how not to.
Image | Gabriella Clare Marino, Unsplash
One day I was sent to the store to buy a few things, including prosciutto cotto (cooked ham). I was instructed on how to order by weight, which was helpful, and that it was to be senza conservanti (without preservatives).
On my walk up the hill to the local market, I practiced the order in my head, but I had forgotten the word conservanti. Since about 40% of the English language has Latin roots, I decided that ordering my ham senza preservativi should work, until the man serving me just about wet himself himself laughing. He was actually very kind and translated his response, which was "that would be chewy," by pretending to chew something very tough. I learned that I had inadvertently asked for my prosciutto without condoms. That would indeed be chewy!
I have never made that mistake again, but have made many others.
Looking at the pesci (fish) on our peach tree (pesca) one day, Mauro's response was to make a fish face and pretend to swim around the tree. I once commented on a buffalo, rather than a brufolo (pimple), on my face to one of my bus drivers and he pretended to be stampeded. And the list goes on.
After my disastrous attempt at babysitting came to an end, I was depressed and broke. As I wondered how I would manage to make it through the summer until my teaching job started up again, one of the best things ever happened.
Image | Volodymyr Hryshchenko, Unsplash
My brother called me out of the blue. I hadn't seen or heard from him in a few years, but that's another story. He had learned from our mother that my summer was not panning out so well and decided to extend an invitation to visit him in Taipei. One of his roommates had just moved out. I could teach English there and he would loan me the money for the flight. This was too good an opportunity to turn down.
I stayed with Jeremy for six weeks and had a marvelous time visiting Taipei, but even better than that, I actually got to know my brother as an adult and found out that I really liked him! We have been friends ever since. Surprisingly, I also made great leaps forward in Italian after this detour. I guess it gave my mind a chance to rest and process what I had already learned.
At the end of August, I went back to Italy with the idea of spending another year to master the language. That was more than twenty years ago and here I am... still learning and occasionally still mangling the language.
