Monolingualism Considered Harmful

This has always been a blog about language, so I’m going to tell you a story about language.

My parents moved to Lausanne, Switzerland when I was three months old. We lived there until the summer before my sixth birthday, when we moved to the USA. Both of my parents are from the USA and come from English-speaking families, so I speak English with them. In Lausanne, though, I was in a French-speaking context. I went to nursery in French, and the first two years of primary school in French. I spoke French to most of my friends, except those who also came from English-speaking families.

When we moved to the USA, I began kindergarten at a local school. The language of instruction and socialization was English, exclusively. Within two years I had completely forgotten all my French. My mother tried with tutors, local French-language expatriates, and summer camps to keep my skill alive, but it was all for nothing: a plant uprooted will surely die. Even my memories from my time in Switzerland were translated to English in my mind.

When I was twelve, languages began to be offered in school: in the USA, students are generally not exposed to a to-be-learned language before eleven or twelve years old and almost never take a second to-be-learned. I was lucky (private school) that my language teachers were highly competent, and that there were students in my class who were native French speakers, children of French-language expatriates.

I picked it up quickly. It felt as though, rather than learning for the first time, I was being reminded: every time we learned something it came easily, since it was something that I, deep down, already knew. Of course, there were limits: I spoke French like a native when I was young, but I was only almost six when I stopped. I had hardly begun to learn to read, and never entered into the detailed study of the language and its nuances that is necessary to master it.

After seven years of study, I spoke French pretty well. I could read and write at a middle-school level, which is respectable considering how little time, relatively, I spent studying French. After four years of very little use at university, I can still speak the language: somehow, it’s harder to forget the second time, or maybe my brain is less plastic than it was.

Travelling in Europe, I’ve had the luxury of being able to have solid, extended conversations in French with francophones. One, a French-speaking teacher of English and German, gave me (in French) this feedback: “even if there’s errors in how you conjugate verbs, you speak the language”. There are still innumerable tiny details in French that I will probably never master; I don’t think that I will ever know the corners and tricks of French like I know English’s, and my French vocabulary is still much smaller than English.

But I feel more comfortable speaking French, more myself. I feel as though I am more easily able to say what I mean in French than in English. My written English is much better than my written French, but when speaking English I struggle to say even simple things: many English speakers I meet do not, in speaking, perceive me to be a native English speaker. Perhaps I’m not.

Not all, but many of us are dislocated in language: many of us have a home language we’ve forgotten or are forgetting. English is, because of the Empire, a language of immigrants and refugees; perhaps all languages are, to some extent. Our thoughts are colored and formed by what it is possible to say in the language in which we formulate our thoughts; who we are is created by what we can say. I can more easily say what I mean when speaking French, even if I don’t know the words or trip over the grammar; what I can say in French is closer to who I am than what I can say in English.

I don’t mean, though, that I can’t write English: written English is beautiful and austere; delicate harmonies of connotation can be tuned by the fine selection of words. This is true in all languages, but in English I feel it most clearly. It’s the language my parents speak to me; it’s the language their parents spoke to them. I learned to speak from my mother, and write from my father. From my mother I learned to be indirect, to delicately suggest; from my father, to construct sentences like architecture.

Goethe said something like “the one who only knows one language doesn’t know that one well.” Kabe said that “one must speak at least three languages to be able to write with good style.” They would know. My English is certainly improved by my French: after speaking French for a while, I find that I can speak English more fluently. Knowing English teaches me attention to detailed shades of meaning that impoves my French.

There is still, for me, a break in memory where I forgot French; when I was young, I was ashamed to say “I used to speak French, but I forgot.” I felt keenly the lost part of me, the silenced voice that I missed. But that wasn’t the end: I spoke French, then I didn’t, and now I do. Known, forgotten, learned again. Such is the way of t