I have spent my life learning languages. Language after language. I read today, somewhere in the depths of internet clickbait aimed at an itinerant traveler, that people who speak different languages switch their personality to fit the language they are speaking. The article seemed to be suggesting that this switch was a falsehood, a manipulation of some kind, and I laughed out loud. I know that I am different when I speak different languages; my little sister constantly complains that my voice shoots an octave higher in Spanish. But if a switch of personality is a falsehood, we are all liars. We all speak different languages, as language is based in context. The context of our lives moves–and our symbols, our connections, our tongues move with it.
The article left me laughing, but my thoughts quickly moved from the absurdity of its premise to the small and hard truth its author had struck–that is, the utter futility of languages and language learning. Living in a language other than your mother tongue requires acceptance of the mortality of experience. I cannot truly describe a moment lived in Portuguese to an English Speaker, unless I describe it in Portuguese. Translation never truly captures the subtlety of complicated experiences. Thus, lives lived in multilingual contexts are up to a certain point untranslatable. I cannot truly describe who I am to someone else, without the use of all the languages I have contextualized my life with. How can you describe a life lived in eight languages without using them all? And if we are defined in a social context, if we construct our meanings socially, then how can I maintain my sense of self unless these languages persist in my life? Attrition of a language is the death of a self, just as learning a language is the creation of a new self.
I do not use German anymore. For four months, at eighteen years old, I lived German, Catalan, and Uruguayan Spanish. All together. The other day a Belgian girl next to me used the word fertig at the end of a long day, drinking wine in an Italian restaurant at the edge of a favela in the north of Brazil. The word alighted on synapses I didn’t know were still quietly waiting in a dusty corner of my mind. That one word–fertig–spoken in Flemish, a language I don’t even speak–brought back so much. I was overwhelmed by a flood of experience in that one moment, drinking sweet coffee next to the kitchen of a social project in Brazil, children running and screaming in a Portuguese dialect particular to the Northeast of Brazil. Bora, Bora! Pra Casa!
As these languages, these experiences become less present to me, it is as if I am in a constant process of mourning. My heart and mind together feel the loss of these vocabularies, these ways of describing the world that at certain points in my life gave consistency, sticky stability, to my world. As these words fade from my mind, I grasp at them, wishing to record them in a firmer pallete than the mind: to make a lasting meaning of the relationships I have built in them, the cities I have navigated with them.
However fragmented my comprehension has been, I have to have faith that the web these languages create in my life is coming together in a shape that I will be able to perceive eventually. At moments I feel a great thirst to speak these languages again; to drink Pisco with Chileans, the Huasos and Huasas that first expanded my vocabulary. To read Irish street signs and laugh at Gaelic pronunciation, yelling at my cousins to not make dirty jokes in a language I can’t understand. The bits of quiche I learned in the Mayan Highlands in Guatemala come back to me at inexplicable moments, when mist is settling in the early morning along Lake Washington and I feel as if I am back there. I mouth the Burmese words for fried dough and sweet tea, “i ja quay,” when I am hungry on the Seattle metro, remembering busy roadside tea huts, with fried tofu salad and green tomatoes.
German comes to me in the most mundane ways. When I receive emails from the bus company I caught once from Berlin to Stuttgart, a harrowing journey of 10 hours with a dead iPod through miles of fields dotted with windmills. When I see twins on the street who remind me of the sweet four-year-olds I aupaired, and how they would make michevious smiles and yell that they were “schwillinge.”
Portuguese is in my daily context…paired with surf and sea, fruit in the morning, it’s a decisively loud language. It’s a language that doesn’t apologize for itself; like an abrasive hug that you have to accept to enjoy, or your character of an aunt who comes rushing in kissing your cheeks and trying to make you eat everything in the house, then turns on the radio, her singing voice permanently off key.
Spanish is an old friend, a familiar song that trips off my tounge, falling into place, singsonging back into context. Accents trip my tongue; Ajjiii, aajjaa, la plajjjaaa. Vos no sos de aqui. Sipo, que weon. Pucha, que haceis. Ya que me quieres mas que nunca. Y vos, y tu, la tia, la micro, la tierra, el mar. Back around, yaaaa poo.
I am trying to accept that the paths we live are fleeting. I am who I am not because of the many languages, vocabularies, ways of being that my body has lived, but because of the people that used these vocabularies with me – who accepted the meaning I was making. They acknowledged my vocabularies and returned them, as I interpreted their words like a clumsy human dictionary (aided by an iPhone). I acknowledging their words as I learned them from Google Translate, then used them again to describe my world. These words will wait for me, to be relearnt, in order to make meaning once again.
Leila Reynolds is a senior majoring in Anthropology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She has studied abroad in Chile, Brazil, and India and loves learning new words. She recognizes the privilege inherent in her U.S. passport and the resources available in a Western academic context.
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