Your Mother Tongue

They say that the typical human infant is born with the ability to learn any language.  When we came out of our mothers’ wombs, we had the potential to learn fluent Mandarin Chinese, Castilian Spanish, Navajo, Kikuyu, Icelandic, or any other of a number of diverse languages.  As we age, our ability to learn does not disappear, but certainly dramatically decreases and our chances of making someone believe we are native speakers is abysmal. 

Babies make all kinds of crazy sounds as they are exploring their vocal chords, tongues, lips and breath.  Apparently, as infants are picking up the nuances of pronunciation for the language they are learning, they disregard the sounds that don’t have a place.  If the child is learning English, those interesting guttural sounds that we hear in some places, or the clicking noises used by others just fade away into non-retrieval as the child ages.  

Have you ever had the experience of hearing someone say a word in another language that you try to say back, but when told you have not said it correctly, cannot hear the difference?   My mother-in-law tries to teach us some words in Chinese.  This is a language that is particularly reliant on tone to pronounce a word.   Put the emphasis on the wrong syllable and instead of saying what you think is “beans,” you’ve got the other person sniffing her own armpits because you’ve told her she’s got body odor.

When I think about this phenomenon of language acquisition, I also think of languages that are not so literal.  In a country like the United States, where there is such a diversity of experience and circumstance there are many who speak the same “language” but don’t really understand each other at all.  What I think it may come down to, is that people grow up with different experiences of their reality.  We grow up in particular communities, with particular expectations and beliefs.  If we are never exposed to different ways of seeing the world, we slowly lose our ability to understand how it could be any different from the way we’ve always experienced it.

When I have discussions with people who see the world differently than I do, sometimes it seems like I can’t get the other person to understand what I’m trying to say and vice versa.  We’ve grown to understand different languages.  How disorienting it is to travel to a place where you don’t understand a word someone is saying.  It can be exhausting to spend a day, let alone a number of days trying to navigate the streets, restaurants and hotels of a country (or another person) by any means possible, usually involving a lot of hand gestures and still not be sure that you’re where you thought you were.  That’s not to say that one is right and the other is wrong.  It’s just the only way we know how to talk. 

Apparently, babies who grow up in bi-lingual or multi-lingual families have a lifetime advantage in their brain’s ability to learn more languages, perform complex multi-tasking and a host of other desirable traits.  Wouldn’t it be beautiful if we could learn to speak some other “languages” than the ones we’ve always used?