Meme #4 - languages

Today's question comes from littlered2, who asked: If it's not too personal, languages: which languages you speak, in what contexts, and what they mean to you.

Well, this one is personal (and I'm honestly so touched by your sensitivity in picking that up - it's not immediately obvious as a personal question!), but I am trying to talk - and let myself think - about it more, so here we go.

Languages! Okay. I am good with, and love languages. (I have to remind myself of this a lot, for reasons which will become clear in a moment.) Not in the sense that I'm a super-effective communicator or whatever as the job apps would have it; I mean languages in themselves, their grammars and structures and interesting twiddly bits. (I write stories and I draft things for a living. I figure all of this goes together.)

So the first language I ever spoke was Hindi, and Hindi more than any other is the language of home - both for me, and for everyone; if any one language could be, Hindi would be India's national language, and that makes sense in a way because Hindi is an acquisitive workhorse of a language, anecdotal and crude and beautiful and weird. Hindi speakers, more than any other, drift into English and Urdu and all the other languages of India when they talk; there is this push towards Sanskritisation in India, using new coinages and back-formations, trying to make a purer tongue of it, but I don't think it's terribly successful. For me, Hindi is the language of making tea, getting the milk in, can you chop a couple of onions, and stay tuned, we'll be back after this.

There's more to it, of course. But I lost it. I had it, and I lost it. If I could have any wish granted, it would be to go back in time, to my parents who were so scared - justifiably scared! - that I would never fit in, and we would never go home. I lost Hindi as my language of choice by the time I was six; by the time I was sixteen, it had gone almost entirely; now, I'm twenty-six, and it's back, in moods and lights, and I work at it and I get by, but sometimes there's no there there, like, just, some awful howling loss where an identity-constitutive grammar should live. (This is what I mean when I talk about the decolonisation of the mind - how to rid yourself, both of internalised colonialism, and also guilt: that because you were on the wrong side of a system that didn't want you, it's not you that's made wrong. I dumped a Hindi teacher I had once for not understanding this.) What comforts me at this stage is that it is there, somewhere. I was in India for six days in October and by the sixth day I was reaching for it without thinking; my grandfather once said, live with me for six months and I know you'd be reading me the newspaper. Which was kind, and maybe even true. I hope it was, and is.

(I can read Devanagari script, something of which I am inordinately proud. I read at the grade school level, slowly, sounding everything out, and I annoy everyone by stopping in the middle of the street to do this. Mostly, people observing this come to the conclusion that I have a learning disability.)

I also speak French. Kind of. I had no choice about French - I had a polyglot primary school teacher who loved teaching it, and it's the one I kept on with through secondary school - and although I wish very much that I had more of it, and had kept up with what I had, I think I'm actually at the stage with French where the only thing that will convert me to easy fluency is moving to France for six months and getting unstuck trying to order soup. As a language, I never used to like it very much, but I'm coming around to it now as I get the feel of it as well as just learning it - I like its softness and its elegance of expression. On ne puisse pas rentrer. Yes. Since I left school I've had friends who spoke French from francophone Africa, and oddly, that helped: I thought it was beautiful and grounding to hear it from non-white people.

The only other language I speak anything worth mentioning of is Gaelic, and Gaelic is wonderful - it's so beautiful and fascinating and replete with a kind of musicality, I adore it, and given all my capital-I Issues detailed above, it's a gift. Why learn to speak Gaelic? Not because it's my mother tongue. Not because it would be particularly useful for anything. Not because I'm likely to meet another speaker I didn't already know about! But just because it's a beautiful language, and I love it and I'm pleased to be a statistically significant addition to its body of speakers.

There are some others: I can understand some conversational Bengali because my mother's family are all Bengali, and I have two years of Spanish I can't remember, and have been taught Welsh, though I couldn't say a single meaningful thing about it at this remove of time. Oh, and I have four years of Latin - which I remember the shape of, rather than the substance; I absolutely love Latin grammar and how regular and interesting it is, amo amas amat amamus, etc; and in conjunction with that I was taught some Greek (I'm English-public-school-educated, shut up) - and my father taught me the very beginnings of Sanskrit grammar. He loves Urdu poetry and has tried teaching me the basics of that, to no avail; I believe if my father's father had lived longer, he would have had more success teaching me. Something else that comforts me: my grandfather had never had Hindi, either. He learned it in his thirties and was deeply distrustful of it all his life.

(Oh, English! I forgot about English. Despite everything, I love English: though it isn't home, and has never been designed to be a language for living in, it has been a good place all these years. I love writing in English, I love its wacky spelling and ridiculous plethora of synonyms for everything and shameless biffing up of other languages for vocabulary and cheerful lack of grammatical gender. English is just, it's wonderful and ridiculous and amazing. Did I mention I love languages? Because I really, really do.)