Language & Identity | Language as life itself
Some years ago, a Turkish friend lamented that so few of the thousands of words in the English language are actually used in regular conversation. “You guys have so many great, beautiful, descriptive words,” she said. “Why don’t you use them?”
I agreed with her, and for myself wondered if it was laziness. I remember grumbling when I had to memorize those SAT (one of the U.S. college entrance exams) word lists in my Indiana high school. Why did I have to do that if nobody spoke like that anyway?
My relationship with English has been a strange, and perhaps incomplete, one. While always interested in reading and writing, I have often had trouble speaking eloquently aloud. I worked in an English as a Second Language department at my undergraduate university for several years, spending hours tutoring writing and teaching small conversation classes. After moving to China in 2012, I was either speaking Mandarin (also incompletely), conversing with people who had limited English skills, or talking to other English speakers about Chinese food, motorcycles, or craft beer. When I went to graduate school in the UK in 2016, six years after finishing my B.A., I spent the first several months of my course remembering, or discovering, those “big” academic words in my own language. Nowadays, with slivers of languages from my adventures, I have my own curious way of speaking.
English is no secret to many people in the Netherlands, though. Part of the reason I got decent at Mandarin in China was because I was working with people who couldn’t speak English. Here in Rotterdam, my day job is in English, Dutch websites almost always have an English version, and most of the people I am in touch with regularly (neighbors, grocery store clerks, the beer shop guy) speak English well. Cue some of that lethargy and lack of urgency that affected me when I was studying for those American standardized tests: learning Dutch here will have to be out of interest and fun rather than necessity.
I started to learn Mandarin because I was fascinated by it. I had never seen a language so different from my own, in everything from sounds to the way of writing it. I fell in love with a Chinese person, and with China, and that pushed it along further. Living in China, I learned so much about the world by the words people use to describe things. The word for contradiction, maodun (矛盾), is a compound of the words for spear and shield. What better analogy for a figurative clash?
As Moe discusses in her article in this series, you can become another person in another language while learning more about yourself. After breaking up with the Chinese guy and then with China itself, I gravitated toward new lovers — all non-native English speakers — and proceeded to start learning their languages. I figured that learning their language was the best way to know someone, a way to reach their soul. A romantic gesture (and of course leading to unused vocabulary textbooks after a breakup), but I have still never been far away from my native English.
In her compelling and beautifully crafted book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer pulls from both her training as a botanist and her Potawatomi heritage to encourage a reciprocal, interdependent relationship among humans, other species, and the earth. Telling stories and writing, she says, are ways we can act in reciprocity with the earth, nurturing ourselves and the relationship we have with each other and with this place:
“Other beings are known to be especially gifted, with attributes that humans lack. Other beings can fly, see at night, rip open trees with their claws, make maple syrup. What can humans do?
We may not have wings or leaves, but we humans do have words. Language is our gift and our responsibility.”
It’s 2020, and we see regularly that words can be used to control or deceive. Language can be exclusionary, which I grumbled a lot about in graduate school when reading brilliant ideas in such difficult words and sentences, inaccessible to any sort of audience. Language can be a privilege as well, something that I have realized since I don’t have to try as hard as others to survive in a world where my native language is becoming almost universal.
Thanks to curious nature of language, though, more than one statement can be true at a time: it can also be a gift. It can be used to fight control or deception, and can create a sense of belonging and identity. It is a way of diving deeper into a place and connecting intimately with other people, non-humans, and yourself. Here in Holland, I will still continue with my weekly Dutch lessons and Duolingo exercises. My newly adopted kitten responds to “Are you hungry?” with a few needy meows, though hopefully she’ll start getting used to “Heb je honger?” I suppose finding a Dutch lover will probably help me learn more quickly, too, or at least good friends. And in English, I will honor my Turkish friend and learn the new words that describe ideas and concepts and things that I have yet to imagine. You know how you start noticing things once you learn what they’re called? Maybe that will help me become clearer and more aware as I write, and help others see all of the colors in the world as well.
Do I need to cater to this sense of responsibility? Of course not. I’m lucky and privileged because my survival doesn’t depend on it, even “lest suddenness happens”. This time, I don’t have teachers or parents making me study, or the pressures of making a living in a new place forcing me to learn the local language. I could carry on with the words, thoughts, and feelings I already know, ignoring the gaping holes in my awareness and understanding about the world. But if you want to live, and I mean really live — entangled with others, and the world around you, becoming aware of things you never saw before — then I think learning, using, understanding, and playing with language is one of the best ways to do it. Language — oral, written, or nonverbal — is not only our gift and responsibility; it is life itself.
