Episode 2: The Tapestry of America | John Kazaklis
In the second episode of “Speaking of Us”, we speak with John Kazaklis, Wikitongues contributor.
This is a transcript of Episode 2 of “Speaking of Us”. To listen to this episode, visit Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts. If you enjoy it, please leave a review and subscribe for new episodes! Thanks to Kristen Tcherneshoff for transcribing this episode.
DANIEL: Oh yeah!
KRISTEN: I like it
JOHN: I’m pretty good at snapping, I’m not good at many things, but I’m good at snapping and WI-bowling and fuseball.
[Intro music begins]
KRISTEN: Hey again, and welcome to Speaking of Us, a podcast where we explore what language teaches us about who we are and where we come from. I’m Kristen Tcherneshoff and I’m here today with my co-host, Daniel Bögre Udell. We wanted to thank a couple of our Patrons! Victor Charpentier and Brett Hudson, thank you so much for pledging to one of our tiers on Patreon. If you would like to join Victor and Brett, you can find us at www.patreon.com/wikitongues.
[Intro music ends]
And today we have our second guest on our podcast! Daniel, would you like to introduce him?
DANIEL: Yes, we are here today with John Kazaklis, a wonderful Wikitongues volunteer who has recorded languages from Jordan to Orlando, Florida. And John has a wonderful multilingual background, ranging from the Andes to the Greek Isles. We are going to be talking about all of that today.
John, how are you doing?
JOHN: I’m doing great, thanks for having me guys! It’s really an honor and, yeah, I’m excited.
DANIEL: What languages have you recorded for Wikitongues?
JOHN: Umm…well let’s see…I think over the past four, five years I’ve recorded Greko, which is a Greek dialect in Southern Italy, Pontic Greek, five dialects of Circassian in Jordan, Ladino — also known as Judeo-Espanol — and Turkmen and Turkish. So, roughly about eight languages, yeah.
DANIEL: Wasn’t there a Bulgarian variety that you recorded as well?
JOHN: Yes, yes, thanks for reminding me. It was Pomak.
DANIEL: Pomak!
JOHN: Yeah so it’s spoken by a Slavic speaking minority, I don’t know if that’s the best way to say it. It’s a Slavic language in Northern Greece. Um, but it’s spoken in Southern Bulgaria, in Northern Greece, and Northwestern Turkey, North… — yeah, so that whole Thrace region over there.
DANIEL: And for those who don’t know, Slavic languages comprise a lot of the majority languages, and some minority languages, from Eastern Europe. So, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Croatian, and so on, are all Slavic languages.
One of the stories that has stayed with me over the years is the story of Yenal, the Circassian speaker in Jordan because it’s the story of someone working tirelessly to keep a language alive. And working with a real purpose of uh…holding their identity and their culture.
JOHN: Yeah, no…it was in the summer of 2018, I was in Jordan trying to find a couple of opportunities to record some languages during my visit. A friend of a friend connected me to Yenal and you know he was like hey, let’s meet in this coffee shop, and he was just — he had this overwhelming presence. Super nice guy, just really passionate about his culture. A few generations removed from that community being displaced from their motherland, and a large portion of that community being located, relocated, in Jordan.
Just the passion — I’d say even the burden — he had for his community to uphold the language, cultural traditions. He was just so involved. It was definitely a memorable moment for myself as well.
KRISTEN: And if I remember correctly, you wrote a blog post about this — more than a blog post,
JOHN: Yes
KRISTEN: It was a visual essay. John has, in his day job, he works as a visual anthropologist and edits, takes editorial photographs, and writes beautifully and takes beautiful photos. And I remember some photos you took of Yenal showing — I think it was family symbols, family crests, something along that nature. And I think he was working on a family project, something to do with family names. Can you..?
JOHN: Yeah
KRISTEN: Was there something important with that?
JOHN: Um..he was studying ancient variations of the Circassian language. Or, different versions of it because there are, of course, different dialects throughout the diaspora. And so he was studying that, a specific alphabet, and trying to figure out the family crest for the wider community within Jordan because they are all pretty connected. So he showed me his notebook, there are photographs within that post. Just notebooks of the symbols, the research, the meaning, and finding the meanings behind family names and crests, so.
It was beautifully done. And just, the time and energy he put into doing all of that research. Says a lot.
DANIEL: What is the status of the Circassian language and culture in Jordan today?
JOHN: Um…I don’t know exactly, like politically. I know throughout history, when they were invited for, brought to Jordan, they have a very strong military history from their motherland. So when they were brought to kind of help administrate Jordanian lands and the country, they kind of had favor with the government, even politically. And so they’ve kind of been protected and safeguarded which has kind of helped, I’d say, or allowed their language to thrive after several generations since they came in the late 1800s.
Um, so just think, all those years, there is still a community that thrives as a minority, in a new land — you know, in a different — we could say, region — and there is still, they have their schools, they have their dance troupes and their culture groups, and they are able to thrive. More than 100 years later, which is fascinating, so.
DANIEL: So Yenal is hopeful about the future of the Circassian language?
JOHN: Um, he is. From what I remember he had mixed feelings. Being Circassian, the identity is strong within the community. I think there is more openness now to intermarriage amongst other groups in Jordan. And so, he mentioned how, I think with modernization and people being lazy — I don’t know if there is a better way to say it, that’s being kind of frank — people are resorting to the common language, instead of taking the work to really keep their ancestral language alive.
And so the identity is there, but the language really struggles at times, within the community.
DANIEL: Right. And, and, the common language is of course Levantine Arabic, correct?
JOHN: Correct, yup.
DANIEL: And so let’s talk about some of the other communities you’ve spent time with in your travels as a Wikitongues volunteer. The experience of diaspora and displacement is not unrelated to the Ladino language and the people who speak it.
John & KRISTEN: Mmhmm.
JOHN: Oh, for sure. It’s a huge part of their history. Yeah. I mean, I don’t know where to begin. But, yes.
DANIEL: Tell us a little bit about Jack. That was his name, right, Jack?
KRISTEN: Mmhmm.
JOHN: Jacob. Jack, yup. Jack Benmayor. So Jack. Very kind man, you could see it in his eyes, too. I just remember his smile and his uhh, yeah, his eagerness to share a little bit of his language with me. And you know, as a result, with all of us. But, Jack, his parents were survivors of the Holocaust and he is a member of the Ladino or Jewish community. I would say Jewish community in Thessaloniki, which is the second largest city in Greece, located in Northern Greece. And the majority of the Jewish population is of Ladino or Sephardic descent. They are Ladino speaking and of Sephardic descent, meaning that they originated from the Iberian peninsula after the [Ohambra] decree. Which meant in the 14- and 1500s they left the Iberian peninsula, the Spanish Kingdom. And most of them went to the Ottoman Empire, where they received them with open arms and a lot of them settled in Thessaloniki at the time. And of course there were smaller portions who went to other parts of the Mediterranean and Europe.
So Jack is a part of that community. His parents were survivors. And um, there’s probably about 1,000 members of the Jewish community left in Thessaloniki. There aren’t exact numbers, but they are saying about 600–1,000. Numbers could vary depending on who you talk to or where you read. But only, I’d say a dozen of those members, of that community, speak Ladino, or Judeo-Espanol. And Jack was one of those!
I connected to, I was connecting with the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, Erica, and she was like hey, I have a person for you, the perfect person to come and share, and has a history with the community. And so, she scheduled a meeting and we met at the museum, and we did a recording, in 2016.
DANIEL: For those who are unfamiliar, the Alhambra Decree was part of the series of steps taken by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Castilian Aragon to, effectively, ethnically cleanse the new Spanish Kingdom of Jews and Muslim Arabs.
JOHN: Mmhmm.
DANIEL: And so, in a lot of cases, you had to either — this was a process that took several decades. But, you either had to completely assimilate into Latin, Catholic society or get out. And sometimes assimilation wasn’t an option. And so it was get out or die.
But what I love about this, is your openness to learn about differently cultures. You know, when I think people travel, they often get really excited about old buildings or they get excited about regional food, and they don’t realize the immense wealth of stories and the immense diversity of stories, everywhere. Right? Like, all of these — cultural diversity is still alive in places. And that’s a totally different way to get to know a place when you travel.
JOHN: 100%.
KRISTEN: I remember when you travelled to Calabria and you reached out to a family there to talk with them and discuss their Greko heritage.
JOHN: Mmhmm.
KRISTEN: The Greko community faced a lot of assimilation pressures during the 20th century when governments around the world, and especially in Europe, were building statehood. And there was the idea that one language, one culture, one nation. And that mindset was ushered into the region and surrounding regions, and it really affected the community. And it became looked down upon to speak Greko. And what, there was a nickname — well, not really a nickname, a belittling name given to Greko speakers at the time for speaking their mother time? I don’t know the word, it translated into -
JOHN: Podeki.
KRISTEN: That’s it. It means idiotic, or stupid.
JOHN: Like idiotic or stupid, yeah. it’s a degrading word that they use for that community.
KRISTEN: Yeah and can you tell us about your time traveling there? Because just that, that bodes to the point that Daniel was speaking, of you seeking out cultures to learn more and spend time with them while you are traveling.
JOHN: Mmhmm, yeah I mean, I try, you know if I’m going to go somewhere new, or even if its, you know, somewhere I’ve been to before. You know, I grew up going to Greece to see my family. What can I learn differently? Or what can I experience differently? Or something new about that culture, community? And..I was fascinated about smaller Greek dialects around the diaspora, around the world. And I was like, I want to go to Italy, but maybe somewhere off the beaten path.
And I heard about the Griko community, which is in the heel of the boot. But, I stumbled upon and started to read more about the Greko community, which is on the toe of the boot, just across the Strait of Messina from Sicily. They’re a lot smaller, they were a little bit more secluded, from the rest of the Greek community, the Greek speaking community, on the Italian peninsula. Just had a lot more adversity and struggles with maintaining their identity and culture and language.
And so, I reached out to Maria Olimpia Squillaci and she was actually studying at the University of Cambridge at the time. ’Cause when I wanna learn about a culture or language and connect with the locals, I always do my best to connect with a local beforehand to kind of be my in — into that community. Instead of like, metaphorically door-knocking on everyone’s door like hey, tell me about your life and tell me about your culture, I’m an American.
KRISTEN: [laughs]
JOHN: And so, I — as much as I can read about a culture, or language, I am, you know, not a part of that culture. And so I want to be as sensitive and aware to that as much as possible. So having someone on the ground that’s a local and is willing to connect me and build those bridges to local stories and meet local people and experience different aspects of the culture is huge to me.
And I think its just the way I’ve navigated that. And when I went down to Calabria, Maria was amazing. Her and her family are the definition of hospitality. She connected me with a lot of people there. We did home visits to some Greko speakers, a lot of them elderly. And herself, her and her sister I would say are probably on the younger end of Greko speakers in the region. Just because the language is only being spoken in a handful of settlements in the Calabrian region.
It was humbling, just to see that. Just to see their passion. The — all the handwork they put into their language and cultural identity over the years. And you know, it’s a testament to, I think, her father’s passion and work too. He — a lot has be done in the home, sometimes, to have the following generation… I guess you could say, pass the baton to them for them to keep the language and cultural identity alive. And it’s up to them, you know, to have that excitement, passion, or desire to keep the language alive, too. It’s what can we do as this generation, to prepare the next generation to want and desire to keep that language and culture alive. So…it was really an amazing experience.
DANIEL: And Maria Olympia is doing a wonderful job -
JOHN: Yes.
DANIEL: Carrying the language into the next century.
KRISTEN: Mmhmm.
DANIEL: One of the things that I’ve loved hearing about speaking with her is her use of social media and WhatsApp to speak the language every day. Because of course, minority language speakers sometimes struggle with simply finding space to speak their language because they’ve been so culturally displaced, even within their ancestral homelands.
JOHN: Mmhmm.
DANIEL: And so when I asked her what is your goal for the revitalization, or the sustainability, of Greko. And she said honestly, just speaking it every day. Um, and one way or another, they find ways to do that. But…they’re still dealing with the tyranny of linguistic prescriptivists, aren’t they?
JOHN: Yeah, unfortunately. That’s a great way to put it. Just tension with, I’d say some people who have more nationalistic, purist perspectives about what is Greko, or where, how is it still alive. And just — yeah, it’s frustrating to see because I’ve seen firsthand Maria Olympia’s work. You can see it around the community. You can see how people are showing up to her classes or workshops or her theatre classes or camps she does in the summer to have people encounter and work with the language in a different way, outside of the classroom. And to see someone doing such good work for the community, for the language, and see them be attacked in that way is hurtful. Because their are not many people like Maria Olympia doing what she’s doing.
DANIEL: Who’s attacking?
JOHN: Well, there are some — I don’t know specifically who are in like that. But just some Greek nationalists, who don’t agree with maybe the narrative of how Greko came to be, today, and its history. And calling her out, or their family out, for not doing it in the “best” or most “pure” way, in relation to Greek history or the Greek language, the modern Greek language. And so, I don’t know all the exact details. But its seeing people come online or on Facebook or on different platforms is really not doing anything for the language itself.
DANIEL & KRISTEN: Right.
JOHN: And so I’m just like, what good are you doing? And if its going to come out of your mouth and attack, is it to feed your ego? And are you feeling better, or is it helping the language in the community? What can we do to really help this language that could really just dissolve in a generation? And so, that’s been sad to see.
DANIEL: And so these are just actually Greek people, right, from Greece?
JOHN: Yeah, mainland Greece.
DANIEL: Right, so not Greko people who disagree with how their own language is being revitalized. These are related people who are just jerks online.
JOHN: Yeah, and they’ve had an interesting history and experience. Because even initially, I think out of a good place, the Greek state, the Greek government, sent Modern Greek, Demotic Greek, teachers to Calabria — I think in the 70s or 80s. But it wasn’t doing any good. I mean, the intentions were good. But it wasn’t doing anything for Greko.
DANIEL: Right.
JOHN: Because the locals didn’t have a connection to Demotic Greek, they have a connection to Greko. And they are, you know, different varieties. And so, it wasn’t a sustainable effort to revitalize Greko at all or to bring in the Greek alphabet. They were, in a way, asking them to meet the Greek language where its at in mainland Greece, instead of, you know, meeting the locals where they were at. Meeting them with their history and their culture in their community.
DANIEL: This reminds me a lot of the revitalization of Louisiana French, which is largely driven by support from the French government, which is funding standard Parisian continental French education in Louisiana. And of course, Louisiana French is super different from continental French, it’s a lot more closely related to Acadian and Quebec. They roll their r’s like in Spanish and Italian. There’s kind of a tangy, sing-song drawl to the way they speak. Nothing like French.
And we occasionally on our Louisiana French videos get comments from French people saying, “This isn’t really French, this is just French with an American accent”. And it’s like, no it’s not, and — why, you don’t even know about this, why are you commenting on this?
JOHN & KRISTEN: [laughter]
KRISTEN: My favorite comments are when — we get this type of comment, daily — my favorite is when people say, “This isn’t French!”. And I wanna say, “No, you’re right, it’s Louisiana French!”. [laughs]
JOHN: Right! Correct!!
DANIEL: Ahh, so…in linguistics, we call this “linguistic prescriptivism”, which is when people think that a standard variety of a language is forcibly and objectively the correct way to speak. Also known as “grammar nazis”.
JOHN: Right.
DANIEL: And this isn’t a thing in linguistics, linguists don’t care about this folks. We should do a whole podcast episode -
KRISTEN: We really should. I can attest that as a linguist, but also from Alabama, I do not ever use “whoever” and “whomever” correctly and I could also care less about ever getting it right. [laughs]
DANIEL: [laughs]
JOHN: Right!
KRISTEN: It’s my English, I don’t care, I ain’t using whomever, the end.
JOHN: Exactly [laughs]
DANIEL: I, on the other hand, love “whomever”.
KRISTEN: [laughs] Sometimes when I’m texting Daniel I just throw it in there for giggles. I’m like, hmm maybe a whomever would be good right now!
JOHN: [laughs] You like whomever over whoever Daniel?
KRISTEN: [laughs] He does, he likes -
DANIEL: Well I mean I like it when, I like it in the context that it’s intended for. I don’t like use “whom” you know, when it’s not correct.
JOHN: Hmm.
DANIEL: But I do use whom if it’s the object of the sentence. We have so few declensions in English, we barely conjugate our verbs, we gotta embrace -
JOHN: Right.
KRISTEN: We gotta embrace it when we can!
DANIEL: We gotta embrace it. Yeah, it’s fun.
JOHN: We love that for you.
KRISTEN: We are going to take a short break and we will be back in a few minutes.
[intro music]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome back to Speaking of Us, where we explore what language teaches us about who we are and where we come from. We are here with John Kazaklis, a wonderful multilingual Wikitongues volunteer. We are going to talk a bit about his own linguistic heritage.
But before, we have a question from one of our Patrons, Chris Weber. Chris Weber asks, “Hi, I’ve been thinking about this question lately and I can’t seem to wrap my head around it well enough to even phrase it properly, but hopefully it can spark something of use. It is known that language shapes the way we think. If I’m not mistaken, when a language is learned later in life after the “critical period”, it is stored or centered in a different part of the brain than native tongues. With these two facts in mind (are they facts, am I mistakenly peddling fake news?), I wonder if the location of the language in the brain is linked to the way we think, or if the way we think is linked to the language we mainly think in. I suppose this is a roundabout way of asking the fatalism of language learning. Are we doomed to think based on the structures and limits of our first language? Or are we able to expand our perception of the world based on language learning? Is it about the familiarity with a language, or is there something structural in the brain? Forgive the lack of eloquence, as you can tell, these are incomplete thoughts I’m having trouble linking together in a coherent patten”.
Chris, this was very coherent and very well linked together. I would dare say it was elegant and a very great question. And I think that a real linguist, like Kristen, would be the best person to answer it.
KRISTEN: Thank you Chris for your lovely question, it was wonderful. And I think it breaks down into multiple questions. I’m going to answer your middle question first, the one about neurolinguistics, that languages we learn later in life are stored in different parts of the brain. And that is actually true.
DANIEL: Not fake news.
JOHN & KRISTEN: [laugh]
KRISTEN: It’s not fully understood though, by linguistics and neurolinguists. Our mother tongue language, or languages, if you grow up with multiple — wink, wink someone on this podcast [laughs]. If you grow up with multiple languages, they are stored in the left hemisphere of your brain. The older you get, when you learn new languages, they are not stored in one side of the brain — they are, they go back and forth. It’s not really known why that happens or what causes it, but there are switches between the left and right sides. I think we will answer this question more in the future. I would love to have a neurolinguist as a guest on our podcast to explain more about why this happens.
In terms of your other question, about language shaping thought. That is not entirely true or proven. So you weren’t perpetuating fake news,
DANIEL & JOHN: [laugh]
KRISTEN: But this is an idea that has held fast culturally for decades, even when it hasn’t held its own scientifically. So this theory is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It was named that after the American linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf, who — fun fact — was originally a firefighter. And so this hypothesis dates back to almost 100 years ago, in the late 1920s. And it’s, from a linguistic perspective, it’s the theory that semantic structure of a language shapes, or limits even, the ways in which a speaker forms conceptions of the world. And how we say this culturally nowadays is language shapes how you think.
And so this idea, that a persons native tongue determines how they think really took off in the mid-1900s. And it was especially popular among behaviorists. Behaviorists taught that our behavior is a result of external conditioning and it is not affected at all by our feelings, emotions, or thoughts. Those ideas started changing in the 60s when we got into cognitive theory and took in account feelings and emotions and how that affects who we are as people. So this was taught a lot in the 1900s, but by the 1990s, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the theory that language shapes thought, determines thought, had really fallen out of favor with the majority of linguists and anthropologists. Which concurred with the time that the internet really started taking off and booming and media started being distributed faster. And now it’s a very popular thing to share in cultural media.
And so, if you look at the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, there are a few things that were challenged, or incorrect, when we look at them now and analyze them. So, one of Whorf’s central arguments in his paper was with a certain community, a language, the Hopi community, he stated that — or, they stated that — they [the Hopi] have a different, a unique understanding of how time works and its distinct from the typical Western concept of time. But it was shown later…Stephen Pinker talked in the 1990s, which is when the fall of this theory started taking place, or the weakening of this theory — Pinker argued that Whorf never met anyone from the Hopi community and that the Hopi conception of time was not that different from how English native speakers understand time.
There’s also the problem with this theory of translatability. So, if each language had a completely distinct reality encoded within it, how then would we translate from one language to another? Yet, we translate on a daily basis. We translate books, we translate philosophical texts, we are able to translate things. So that’s another viewpoint that weakens this theory. There’s also this idea of the chicken and the egg. Well, which came first? The chicken or the egg? Languages are human creations, so showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn’t really tell us whether its the language that shapes the thought or the thought that shapes the language or if its an external source like the culture, the community.
There’s been a lot of studies done to try to show that this happens. A famous one, done in the 90s, was with Russian speakers who have more words for different shades of blue than English speakers do. In English we often say “blue”, “dark blue”, “light blue”, “baby blue”. But there are a lot more words in Russian for categorizing blue. And so, this study showed — it proved — that Russian speakers were able to categorize different shades that came on the screen quicker than English speakers could. And it was a really big theory that kind of shook the linguistic world and the cultural world and I think this is what helped perpetuate the idea of language shaping thought. But, if you go back and analyze the study and look at it, it actually shows that Russian speakers were faster by not even seconds, but mere milliseconds. So really at the end of the day, it doesn’t make that much of a difference.
So, my largest thought with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea that a persons language has no word for a particular concept — and if that held true, then someone would not be able to understand that concept. Which, as multilingual speakers, all three of us on here, we know that holds untrue. You can understand something in another language that you might not have that concept for in your mother tongue. For example, I’ve been learning Finnish because I moved to Finland four years ago and in English we have no equivalent for the Finnish word “kalsarikännit”, but before I started speaking or learning Finnish, I definitely sure understood the concept of sitting alone at home in my underwear and getting drunk on my couch.
JOHN: [laughs]
KRISTEN: We might not have a word for that, but I was really good at doing that word and partaking in it. So I can understand it. Um, but since [laughs]. So I explained why this theory has been debunked by some linguists and why some linguists still support it. Sorry this — I’m almost done, this is getting really long. I get really excited about these kind of questions.
JOHN: No, this is awesome.
KRISTEN: But nowadays, since the 90s, there has been a resurgence of this theory. It’s called Neo-Whorfianism. It’s essentially a weaker version of the original hypothesis. And this, this new version, this light version, is known as linguistic relativism. And it’s a version that says language influences a speaker’s worldview, but doesn’t determine it. To me, since language and culture are so inherently intertwined, a lot of this is actually culture shifting and growing our perception. I think culture really influences a speaker’s view. And if one community speaks a certain language and they have a certain culture, that’s going to affect how you see certain things.
So, you can learn any concept in any language. Every language has the ability to speak to a certain topic. But I think, as you asked Chris, learning languages as you get older, are we set in stone of what we believe or what we know? No. Learning a new language could open the door to new concepts that maybe you do not have in your culture. And so the language is the door into learning more about that. Say you learn about the famous example, the languages that have a lot of words for snow, right. And that’s a common example. But, if you’re learning one of these languages, say you’re learning a Samí language that has ten times or five times that words for snow that your language has, you might wonder why culturally that was needed. And so that can help expand your worldview from that perspective. It’s not exactly the language itself, you can understand wet snow versus dry snow in English, even if there aren’t two separate words for it, but culturally it, it changes what you know about weather, about geography, about placement, etc. And that grows into more doors politically, emotionally, and so on.
JOHN: Mmm.
DANIEL: It opens up your mind the same way that brushing up on math would or reading a new book would. And there are some studies that show being, that show multilingualism broadly as a cognitive benefit. The more languages you learn, no matter when you learn them -
KRISTEN: Mmhmm.
DANIEL: Keeps your brain in shape. Makes you better at math, makes you a little sharper analytically. But it doesn’t matter what the languages are. I wanted to add to this something I heard recently, in an interview with somebody named Aza Raskin, who is actually part of a biological collective working on decoding the songs of whales — maybe we will find out that it’s actually the speech of whales, with phonemes and syntax, who knows — but, the way machine translation works is an AI will compare parallel samples of languages and statistically guess the meaning of what you typed into the AI or spoken into the machine translator, right.
At the end of the day, this kind of single algorithm that they have developed — and there’s variations on it right, there’s Google Translate, there’s Bing Translate, what have you — but this actually works for pretty much all languages, as long as you have enough data for each language. The reason that so much machine translation doesn’t work is just because the languages themselves don’t have enough data for the computer to read. But the reason that this kind of like, statistical assessment guessing of like the meaning between languages, works between all human languages is that because human language broadly, as a biological function of our species, has kind of like a singular shape to it. And the differences we perceive between them are — on a human scale, very very different — but like if you zoom out, right, and kind of like blur the resolution a bit, the differences that we perceive are a little bit more superficial then we might realize.
And of course this is not to make the argument that it’s therefore okay for us to have just one language. No, linguistic diversity is a function of our linguistic biology, right. Um, and the more languages you speak, the better everything becomes. So keep learning languages!
JOHN: And I hope the -
DANIEL: And don’t let anyone trick you into believing that you’re too old to learn a language. That’s one of the biggest myths ever. I didn’t actually learn any of my languages, or second languages, until I was 16 or older. I’ve done all my language learning -
JOHN: Wow, that’s awesome.
DANIEL: Unlike our guest, John Kazaklis, who has a very interesting, multilingual heritage, spanning from the Andes to the Greek Isles. John, what has growing up multilingually done to effect the way you see the world? What are the languages you speak and that your ancestors have recently spoke? And, and, how has that shaped your worldview?
JOHN: I mean it’s — that’s a layered question. So my mom is from Bolivia, in South America, and my dad is from Greece. They both immigrated to the states in the 70s. They had both Spanish and to a lesser extent, Greek, spoken in the home. But Spanish was I’d say my first language. And when my dad married my mom, he learned Spanish as a way to woo her over. And so they spoke a lot of Spanish in the house as well.
My siblings actually spoke to me in English because they were 11 and 12 years older and already in school. Um, so, I probably could say that both were equally present since I was born. But because my mom constantly spoke to me in Spanish and, even if you look at my childhood videos that they have, I had a thick accent and I sounded like they did until I went to kindergarten. You watch it back and you’re like, “who is that?”. And I had a lisp, it was all cute.
“I think growing up with three languages in the house, you are always picking up on — like, alright, there’s an accent, there’s a language. Or, how can I connect with somebody linguistically or culturally?”
— John Kazaklis
So, the way it shapes my world, man. It effects me every day, and all day. And especially I guess with… Like focusing on Spanish, in a country like this [the United States], where we have a large community, a Spanish speaking community, I feel like I encounter, especially living in Florida or up and down urban areas in the East Coast, you encounter Spanish a lot. And so Spanish was a consistent part of my world throughout my childhood, in school, our community that was lived in in D.C. where I was born and raised — or just outside D.C. And even when I was adult, just jumping in and out of like English, Spanish. Sometimes I think in Spanish or I think in English. Or I feel like I can express myself more in Spanish than I can in English.
But, it affects the way I encounter other Spanish speaking people and I find myself changing my accent a lot, more. I guess on a practical side of things. So if I’m around Puerto Ricans, I speak with a Puerto Rican accent. A lot of people think I’m Colombian because of the way I speak Spanish. Around Venezuelans it’s different, and of course Bolivians have their accent, very Andean in the way that they speak Spanish. And it just, uh, I think growing up with three languages in the house, you are always picking up on — like, alright, there’s an accent, there’s a language. Or, how can I connect with somebody linguistically or culturally? Because where we grew up was also very diverse. I grew up in a community of like Hispanics, from all over Latin America, a lot of Arabic speakers, Korean speakers, Vietnamese, Amharic. You know, you name it. D.C. is just one of those places that’s very diverse.
So everybody had a story, everybody was an immigrant, or their parents were an immigrant. So we, subconsciously, in a city like that, you know how to like — as a kid, or as a teenager, you know how to look at somebody or hear them speak and you knew where they were from. You know, you kind of just get trained that way. Yeah, so, it has impacted me consistently.
DANIEL: You have been investigating a language of your grandparents, right? Because the Bolivian family doesn’t necessarily speak Spanish all the way back, right?
JOHN: They don’t. So, my mother comes from the more — I guess you could split Bolivia into two regions. The more Amazon low-land tropical areas and then the Andean high altitude populated areas. And so she comes from the mountainous region of Bolivia. She — her mother was a Mestiza woman of Spanish and Indigenous descent and her father belongs to the Arab community of Bolivia. That — they eventually settled in Tarija, which is a southern, like the largest city in southern Bolivia.
So my great-grandfather left Beirut in the early 1900s with a whole group of Arabic speakers. They entered South America via Buenos Aires and they eventually made their way and made their final settlement in southern Bolivia. And so, there isn’t — even my mom’s maiden name is not Spanish. It’s Arab. Latinized from “deeb”, which means “wolf” in Arabic, to “dipp”, to make it easier for Spanish speakers. People are like, “oh, you’re half-Latino or you’re half-Hispanic, what’s your mom’s last name?” and I’m like “umm, dipp”.
DANIEL: [claps]
KRISTEN & JOHN: [laugh]
JOHN: Like Johnny Depp, with an “i” [laughs]
KRISTEN: And you have to say it in the most American accent too, right? Like, “I’m dipp”.
JOHN: Yeah, yeah, yeah! My mom’s name is Maria Lola Dipp. And so it’s just uh, it’s interesting. But yeah, I think that’s also indicative of the cultural history and kaleidoscope of many Latin Americans, that it isn’t so binary. Like, it’s not just that everybody is mixed with Spanish, with some type of Indigenous or African blood in there. It’s a little bit more complex. Even if you go to Argentina or Brazil, there’s a lot of Lebanese communities there or Syrian or Arabic speaking communities. Or, you know, a large Jewish presence in Argentina. Um, there’s a large Portuguese presence in Venezuela. And so, on my mom’s side, on her paternal side there’s the Arab roots. The language wasn’t really carried on from my great-grandfather down, but a lot of the, some of the traditions and recipes have been. When I went to go visit that part of the family in 2014 it was my first time there, in that specific city because I would always go to another region of Bolivia to see my family. Um so, it was cool to see, it was fascinating to see the dishes, some of the lingo, they even have a cultural club in that town that the Arabs still belong to.But on my mother’s side, my grandmother was Mestiza, but still spoke Quechua, which is widely spoken all over Andean South America.
DANIEL: And the historic, official language of the Incan Empire.
JOHN: Exactly. And, you know, because of that, it’s legacy — that legacy has its — is evident today with variations of it spoken all the way from like southern Colombia and Ecuador, all the way down through Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and northern Argentina. And so it’s fascinating to see and my mom even understands a lot of Quechua still. You know, she — heard my mom always speak it. I didn’t actually begin to investigate it, yet. I’ve tried to get my mom to speak it a little bit.
But I’ll be honest, there’s all these layers in Latin America, especially in a country like Bolivia. Where, you know, there’s always this focus or pride in your more European or non-Indigenous side of the culture, unfortunately. And so, if you’re trying to dig for Indigenous history it’s like, “Why?! What do you want to know?”. If I ask my uncles it’s just like — it’s frowned upon because of colorism and the history of that within the Spanish Empire during colonial times. And, there’s still a lot of heavy colorism and racism in Bolivia still. So, you know, we’re not “Indeos” — “Indeos” means Indian, which is Native American in South America and in Bolivia. But we still have that significant Indigenous lineage and blood in our family. And yet — and we still speak the language. Not me, but like, a generation ago — my mom and her siblings. But they don’t want to acknowledge the history within the family. Which is unfortunate.
DANIEL: It’s sad how quickly a family can forget, right.
JOHN: Sure.
DANIEL: It’s uh, I’ve always asked my, I’ve started asking my dad more questions about Yiddish because he has like so much Yiddish in his English, you know.
JOHN: Yeah.
DANIEL: And so I’ve asked him about his grandparents speaking Yiddish — or his parents, excuse me. And he had to think about it for a second and he was like, yeah, yeah they did, that was their language, that was what they spoke [laughs]. And it’s like, that’s just wild to me.
JOHN: Yeah.
DANIEL: But now that he has been thinking about it more — the other day I called him and my girlfriend and I were making matzo ball soup and -
JOHN: Nice! I love that.
DANIEL: on Passover and he said, “oh, kneydlekh!” [קניידלעך], which is Yiddish for matzo ball soup and I’ve never heard him say that word before, but it’s just like, he’s thinking about the Yiddish a little bit more lately. And it’s like — I wonder how much, if you could like hypnotize him
JOHN: [laughs]
DANIEL: I like, I wonder how much he actually, like, if he speaks more than you realize, you know?
JOHN: Mmhmm.
KRISTEN: I have always wanted to do that. Like get hypnotized and see how much of a language I could bring back that I spoke when I was younger but don’t speak anymore.
JOHN: Well I guess a funnier side story to this is I had a good friend in college and we’d always joke around because every once in a while I — we lived in the same dorm — we would talk about how we would sleep talk, but sleep talk in Spanish. Um, and so, you need to find out if his dad talks in his sleep. And if so, what’s coming out of his mouth? What language?
DANIEL: Yeahhhh
JoHN & KRISTEN: [laughs]
KRISTEN: Yeah, tell your mom to stay up all night watching him and recording him.
JOHN: [laughs]
KRISTEN: I almost started to say that I forgot you sleep talk, John, and then I realized this is a podcast and it be weird [laughs] if I started talking about how I know about you sleeping.
JOHN: [laughs]
DANIEL: Kristen, John, and a few other Wikitongues people had a tremendous weekend in Alabama where Kristen is from. And because I didn’t come, I got kicked out of the WhatsApp group.
KRISTEN: [laughs]
JOHN: Awhhhh! Are you still sensitive to that?
KRISTEN: [laughs]
DANIEL: Yeah well, it was so unceremonious. I like texted a selfie to the group and that it was like, you have been removed from this group.
KRISTEN & JOHN: [laughs]
DANIEL: And I’m like, oh okay.
JOHN: We missed you, we missed you, your presence was missed.
KRISTEN: We were too hurt, we had to remove you, it was too painful for us.
JOHN: Yeah it is what it is Daniel, it is what it is.
DANIEL: We gotta move on!
KRISTEN: [laughs]
DANIEL: Wait, Kristen, uh tell us, what language did you speak when you were younger?
KRISTEN: Well, I had like bits and pieces of languages. I didn’t grow up like, bilingual per se. But I did have a lot of American Sign Language in my life when I was younger. But not um, like toddler age, more like five, six years old. My dad is fluent in ASL and, still to this day, and my mom was — I don’t know, what’s fluency, right? — she was very high level. Um, [laughs]. But, they are both hearing, but my dad’s best friend is a Child of Deaf Adults, but in their work they both worked with people who are deaf. And so, it was just something that we shared and I was really interested in languages as a kid.
But, I wasn’t ever like fluent, but used it oftentimes with my parents. But when I got older and I guess it like, wasn’t cool to speak a language besides English in school, I stopped using it and it’s funny. If I see people signing I can pick up on some words here and there and I, it refreshes memories. If I see someone, I don’t mean to eavesdrop, it’s rude. But I will see a sign I recognize and I get excited and I’m like ooh, yeah, I know what this is about!
And so that encouraged me a couple years ago to start relearning sign languages. I’ve been learning Kenyan Sign Language, that’s not relearning, that’s just learning from the beginning. But relearning ASL and it has been super fun! I’ve been sending videos to my dad and it’s been cool to just remember that. And I suddenly remembered — he taught me my elementary school song in ASL and I went on the local news in Florida and signed it for people. While signing at the same time, a multilingual -
JOHN: Wow that’s awesome.
KRISTEN: Yeah it’s [singing] “Our school is the best school”…Yeah, anyways [laughs]. it came back to my head, and I remembered how to sign it. And so I’ve been signing that a lot. It’s — I’ve been like jamming at home to my old elementary school song, it has been really fun [laughs].
JOHN: Nice.
DANIEL: And you also had that tremendous Alabama accent didn’t you?
KRISTEN: I did! I thought of this when — John, you were talking about how you switch um, accents or dialects when you speak with different Spanish speakers. I’m from Alabama, but you can’t really hear that in my accent. And when I lived in Tanzania a while back, before I moved to Finland, and my English became very noticeably British sounding. I started saying “university”, which you don’t say as an American, especially with that “u” sound.
ALL: [laughs]
KRISTEN: And I still say “university” to this day. And my dad always says — my dad would get so annoyed when I would go home to visit them in Alabama because people would ask like where I was visiting from. And he’s like, “this is my daughter, dammit!”
ALL: [laughs]
KRISTEN: But yeah, I grew up with an Appalachian accent and when we moved to Florida when I was five, I got teased a lot and went to uh, um, crap, why can’t I think of it, what’s the word in English? Ah, speech therapy. There we go. Went to speech therapy. And still to this day, I notice I bring back my British English that I learned when I lived in Tanzania when I’m talking to Europeans and then when I talk to Americans I get more of a “neutral” American accent and then when I’m talking to my dad I say words that I wouldn’t say with other people like, “I’ll carry ya” and “ain’t” and things of that nature, vocab that we don’t have in other parts of the US. And, yeah. So it’s interesting, if -
JOHN: I love American English accents and dialects. I think that’s a whole beast of its own. It’s so fascinating. Even growing up in DC, but even a lot of the Greek families in Baltimore, there’s a whole Baltimore accent. I could pick up someone from Baltimore or Pittsburgh or even Philly from a mile away. And they are all very similar but very distinct.
DANIEL: Mmhmm.
JOHN: But even the diversity all down, like all throughout the Appalachian region. You know, stemming from Pittsburgh all the way down to Alabama. It’s very fascinating.
KRISTEN: Are there — is there anything from the DC accent that stands out to you? That you maybe take away now that you live in Florida?
JOHN: I have a couple of good friends that pick on me for having a mid-Atlantic accent sometimes. And these are like, he’s like a mentor, one of my best friends, he lives out in California. And he lived, him, when his wife was doing her PhD in Baltimore. And we spent some time together in Africa and he was just like, “whoa, say that again!”. And so like I mean there’s just like different things that would sometimes come out of my mouth. My dad’s Tony, so instead of saying “Tony”, be like “Tonii”. Or like, “you gon go home”, “get chyo phone out”, or “we gon don to Ocean City Murland”. It’s just very like the “o’s” sometimes.
But um, DC is pretty — I don’t want to say this in a discriminatory way, but pretty standard. But I think that’s because the population is so transient. Um, and I’d say, even though it’s below the Mason-Dixon line, it’s still, I’d say culturally the Northeast.
KRISTEN: Oh yeah, it ain’t Southern.
JOHN: It isn’t at all, it isn’t all. Unless you go an hour West towards the Blue Ridge or an hour South towards Richmond, that’s when it gets — there’s a little more Southern influence to the English. But D.C. it’s pretty mid-Atlantic and pretty standard. But um, yeah. And well, even to like what you were saying. If I go home for like a week — and home meaning, visiting my parents — I don’t want to say “watch myself” because there’s nothing to be ashamed of, but sometimes I come back, if I’m like in the house with my parents for a week and I come back to Florida where I live, I’m just like “oh my gosh”. Some people are just like, “your h’s are very hhh”. Like you have to do this.
Because my parents, even though they came in their early 20s from Greece and Bolivia, they still carry a heavy accent in their English. And like, I’ve had, some people be like, “how do you speak English with no accent, if they speak like that?”. And I’m like, “well, I was born and raised in the US and I went to school here, this happens a lot”. Like it’s not a weird thing for people — for sons and daughters of immigrants to speak English without an accent.
“And so I feel just as proud to be Bolivian-American or Greek-American, the son of immigrants, and just as proud to be American because I think those things make me just as American as being born and raised and having several generations in the States. And so I never really felt insecure in my American identity and it just makes me even more proud because like, the tapestry and the history of our country was built this way”
— John Kazaklis
KRISTEN: And so growing up in a multilingual family in the US and being first generation American, what is your relationship with your American identity? What was shaped from school?
JOHN: I think where I grew up I was pretty lucky to be, because it was so diverse, that we were proud to sport our cultural identity and history. Or, our ancestral languages, as well. In addition to an American identity and English, as our language that we speak in school and in every day life. And so I feel just as proud to be Bolivian-American or Greek-American, the son of immigrants, and just as proud to be American because I think those things make me just as American as being born and raised and having several generations in the States. And so I never really felt insecure in my American identity and it just makes me even more proud because like the tapestry and the history of our country was built this way.
KRISTEN: Mmhmm.
JOHN: And so — of course, it can be hard to feel that, in some regions of the country. But for the most part, I’m American.
KRISTEN: I will give you Gen-Z snaps for that one! [snapping]
DANIEL: And so, keep speaking!
JOHN: Mmhmm.
DANIEL: Embrace our multicultural world. This has been Speaking of Us, Kristen and I were with John Kazaklis today, a wonderful multilingual Wikitongues volunteer. If you want to listen to some of the languages that he has recorded over the years or read about his experience in Jordan, you can head over to wikitongues.org/podcast.
KRISTEN: If you would like to stay updated on our oral histories, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel: youtube.com/wikitongues, where we post 12–20 new videos every month. Some of which, John has recorded himself. If you would like to follow along with our blog, you can find us at medium.com/wikitongues.
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[closing music begins]
DANIEL: How would you say “thank you” in Greek?
JOHN: Evcharisto [ευχαριστώ].
DANIEL: Or in other words, thank you.
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