The Captive Reader

How easy is it to forget your native tongue?  It’s a question that has bothered me my entire life.  My mother’s English is entirely unaccented and her Czech now ragged from disuse, but I still worry.  Will I be able to communicate with her as she ages?  Does your mother language push to the fore as other faculties fade?  In a superb blend of science and memoir, Memory Speaks by Julie Sedivy looks at what happens when people lose their native language – and so often their culture – and whether it remains accessible in adulthood.

Like my mother, Sedivy immigrated to Canada from Czechoslovakia after the Russian invasion but, unlike my teenager mother, Sedivy was a small child when she arrived.  Living in Montreal and immersed in both French and English, she and her siblings quickly adopted the languages of their new home, bringing what they learned at school to their conversations at home.  Sedivy notes how consistent this pattern is across immigrant communities; the adoption of the local language is always fast and, within two generations, almost complete – grandchildren rarely speak, never mind fluently, the family’s heritage language.

And when you arrived, as Sedivy’s family did, it was easy to let go of your mother tongue.  Outside of your family home, no one wanted you to speak something else.  Sedivy’s memories are of school in the 1970s but the rules were the same at my school in the 1990s and early 2000s: only the local language could be spoken at school, including on the playground.  From the school’s perspective, it was a way to integrate children faster and prevent cliques from forming.  But there is only so much space in our brains allotted to languages and the existing ones suffer when a new one is learned:

There is no age at which at language, even a native one, is so firmly cemented into the brain that it can’t be dislodged or altered by a new one.  Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there.  Languages can co-exist, by they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention.  When a bilingual person tries to articulate a thought in one language, words and grammatical structures from the other language often clamor in the background, jostling for attention.  And if attention is allotted disproportionately to the new language, the older one suffers the consequences.

For Sedivy, this loss – initially – didn’t feel too immense.  Czech is hardly a practical language: it is spoken in one small country, most of whose inhabitants speak at least one other (more common) language.  And for the first few decades that she lived in Canada, it was a hard language to find outside of the home – something that is wildly different for today’s hyper-connected immigrants:

During my formative younger years, Czechoslovakia truly was a remote, impenetrable place.  For reasons of technology and politics, little passed through its borders, either in or out.  Telephone calls overseas were so expensive, there was no possibility of leisurely conversations with relatives back home.  Letters were opened, read, and censored.  There was no question of being able to go back for visits, even if we could have afforded it.  The Communist government did not consider my family’s departure legal, so we would have been subject to prison sentences upon arrival.  I grew up doubting I would ever return to that country in my lifetime.

Nowadays, I witness how some young people who straddle countries and cultures are able to travel with their families to their ancestral country every year or two, and how they can pull up magazines, blogs, movies and YouTube videos on their screens in the privacy of their bedrooms and conduct secret flirtations with someone across the world who speaks their language.

By adulthood and with the passing of her father, Sedivy was eager to relearn her mother tongue.  But how much of the bizarrely complex language remained (when in doubt, decline everything!  Verbs, nouns, pronouns, numerals, everything!) remained to be unlocked and how much would have to be relearned?

The research Sedivy shares is fascinating, if not personally reassuring about my fear of my mother relapsing in old age: native languages can re-emerge after decades without use.  But for those who never mastered them to adulthood, those who switched languages in childhood, the process is harder and there is learning to be done alongside remembering.  But how to learn?  Sedivy calls students like herself “heritage language learners” – people who want to learn their family’s language to better connect with their heritage and culture.  They don’t just need to know how to order a meal or buy a train ticket, they need to learn the etiquette of a language and culture: how do you talk to elders?  How do you express affection?  Is someone trying to be funny, or insulting?  And most schools are not set up to teach this:

Language classes tend to focus on a style of language appropriate with strangers or acquaintances, but heritage speakers may need to learn the language spoken between insiders, or language that is highly socially nuanced and not just grammatically proficient.

And not every language is used to adult learners.  It’s common to find international students of all ages learning English or French, German or Mandarin.  Native speakers are used to visitors testing their language skills and will kindly help them through garbled exchanges.  But in countries where this doesn’t happen, less courtesy is extended.  I had to laugh then when I came across this typical encounter Sedivy and her brother had at one store:

One store clerk in particular appeared to have great difficulty understanding him.  She informed him, as if she were instructing a child, that he was not pronouncing certain words correctly – as though being informed of this fact would somehow remedy the accent. ‘I’m sorry,’ said my brother, ‘My Czech is not very good.’  ‘Yes, I can hear that,’ said the clerk, without the slightest hint of a smile or encouragement.

The Czech government had a public service campaign to remind people to be nice to people who were learning Czech.  Literally, a nation needed to be reminded to put aside its natural tendency towards criticism and embrace the idea that foreigners might actually want to learn their language.  My family has always claimed Czech is too hard to learn outside of the country but I’m also half certain they didn’t want me to be laughed at (and lectured – always a popular choice) in public.

I loved every page of this.  The science of language and memory is absolutely fascinating and I would read a book entirely devoted to that very happily, but Sedivy’s personal experiences made this something very special (The Economist agrees) and memorable.