In my ear, there are languages that sound beautiful. There are languages that sound precise. There are languages that sound harsh and languages that are not much more than a whisper, to my ear. French is one of those languages that sound beautiful. When the French speak French, it becomes difficult for me to follow. I speak and understand just enough French that I can, mostly, follow what is being said. So my inability to follow lies not so much in comprehension but in distraction. I get distracted by the beauty of the language, especially the spoken form, that I can’t stay sufficiently focused on listening to what is being said–because I am so caught up in how it is being said.
This is also true when I hear a first language French speaker converse in English. The gentleness and the finesse of a French accent just elevates English for me. And it’s not just the French. In Tanzania, when I hear a native Swahili speaker speak to me in English, that “essence of Africa” that I hear in their voice transports my hearing and my mind to the Savannahs of Eastern Africa. When I speak with someone in Mumbai or Delhi (where the accents and dialects can be very different) and they are using English to talk with me, I am always fascinated by the precision and the extreme formality they build into their use of English.
As a North American, I do not run into multi-lingual speakers nearly as much as I do in other parts of the world. Scandinavians who speak six or more languages, Chinese who can move fluently from Mandarin to Cantonese or Brazilians who can work equally well in their native Portuguese or the Spanish of their neighbors remind me that language can be a “with” experience and pursuit.
French WITH English WITH French or Danish WITH Swedish WITH Estonian or Hindi WITH British English make for such a rich experience, even for those of us that are primarily unilingual or whose grasp of other languages just flits around the edges.
And because language is part of culture, when I experience other languages, I’m experiencing not just the words but the culture, the values and the experience of the culture that language comes from.
Being a speaker of only one language, I am constantly reminded of the “with” opportunities I am missing, especially when I run into something who, with equal facility and dexterity, can move from one language to another, often in the same conversation.
We have a friend whose family moved from Germany to the province of Quebec in Canada when the children were young. One of the youngest, who was still learning to speak, spoke in ways that made absolutely no sense to his parents. Concerned for his cognitive development, they took him to a series of doctors and speech pathologists. Finally, they found a specialist who understood what was going on. The doctor said to the parents, “He has no cognitive challenges. He has simply jumbled German, French and English into one big mix–he thinks it’s all one language and so he’s talking to you WITH pieces of English, French and German all wrapped around one idea.”
Obviously, this is not a useful approach to using different languages WITH each other. But, there are great lessons to learn here. German WITH French WITH English, whether its language, culture, history or food, can help us see how similar we all are rather than how different.
If languages can live together WITH each other (not in a jumble as with my friend’s sibling) but in ways that tease our richness and diversity, then why can’t the people–you and I–behind those languages learn to reach into each other’s lives–through language and in so many other ways–to make this a world that not only sounds beautiful, precise and evocative–but is all of that and more. A world of “with” each other in everything we do.
