Here are the things you need to know first. I am thirty years old. I am Indian. My parents arrived in Scotland as newly minted immigrants in the eighties, thinking they’d go home after I was born. Decades later, we’re still here.
My parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, their friends and their community, speak Hindi as a first or joint first language. I do not. I stopped being a fluent Hindi speaker at the age of six, perhaps earlier. The school didn’t like it. Too confusing to educate a bilingual child. If you don’t speak to her in English at home, she’ll never learn.
Gaelic, sometimes referred to as Scottish Gaelic to differentiate it from Irish and known to its own speakers as Gàidhlig, is a Celtic language spoken by just over 58,000 people. It has been in decline for centuries. Anglicisation, colonisation and the Highland clearances all had a role in destroying its traditional heartlands, driving it to the far northwest of Scotland and the islands. In the nineteenth century schoolchildren were forbidden to use it in the classroom; by the 1970s the last monolingual speakers were gone. To speak Gaelic now is a political act.
I am not very good at languages.
On a torrentially wet Easter Sunday, I arrive on Skye for a short course in beginners’ Gaelic. Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the world’s only Gaelic-medium institute of higher education, offers this immersion course every spring and summer: a week for Gaelic learners to spend among a wholly Gaelic-speaking community, where everything from the lunch menus to the prospectuses to the signs for the toilets is in Gaelic.
The view from the college has a smudgy beauty, the peaks on the mainland just visible across the sweep of water, but the rain hammers down. At the registration desk, I gather up all my courage and say: “Tha mi duilich. Chan eil Gàidhlig agam.”
I’m sorry. I don’t speak Gaelic.
“You’re wrong,” says the woman sitting behind it, in English. I am instantly terrified. “Say, chan eil mòran Gàidhlig agam.”
“Chan eil mòran Gàidhlig agam.” I don’t speak much Gaelic.
“Sin agad e. That’s it.”
I have tried and tried to learn Hindi over the years. Trying to speak it at home was painful and self-conscious. Just try, my family said. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t perfect.
Yes, it does, I said. People will laugh at me. People will know that there’s something wrong with me.
(I wanted someone to say: there’s nothing wrong with you. Instead, my relations clapped their hands and summoned everyone in the house. “Guys! Come and listen to the cutest mistake she just made!”)
Attempts at formal study were worse still. “Don’t worry,” said the teacher I found on Gumtree, giving classes out of her front room with children’s books from the eighties. “Everything’s going to be fine. We’re going to fix you.”
“Really,” I said, and never went back.
My first day at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig goes well. I’m asked to introduce myself and say where I’m from. “Not where you’re living,” the tutor cautions. “That’s a different question, which we’ll get to. Where are you from? Who are your people?”
I make a note. That night there’s a pub quiz, bilingual for the benefit of the learners. I watch as one of my new classmates goes to the bar, consulting the dictionary on her phone. “Tha sinn ag iarraidh – er. Fion. Pinc? Shit.”
The bar staff fall about laughing. I am waiting in the doorway, thinking of those dozens of family parties, and every time I have stood in a crowded room humiliated by my own ignorance.
When the bar staff have collected themselves, they explain that no one has asked them for rosé before; that they’re sorry they don’t have any; that they will try to get some for us in advance of the ceilidh on Thursday. The explanation is conducted via Gaelic, English and emphatic gesture. When it’s my turn to order, they tell me: just try it. They don’t laugh when they’re getting my wine.
In the morning I explain to the tutor that although I have lived in many places, in England and America, my people are in India. Tha mi às na h-Innseachan.
Just try! It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect.
But when it’s your own language, it does matter. It matters when it’s your own people who are laughing behind their hands at you. It matters when you’re seventeen, painstakingly reading a road sign, and passing strangers sympathise with your parents. And it matters in adult language classes, when you can’t relax and laugh at your own mistakes like the other learners, because of the constant, drumbeat internal litany: you should know this. You should be better than this.
And, as ever, it matters because the personal is political. It matters because Hindi, like Gaelic, is a colonised space. It is a language complete in itself, with its own history, literature, poetry and tradition. But more than sixty-five years after Indian independence, it has been surrounded and absorbed by English, so among the Indian middle classes it is no longer a prestige language. It is the vernacular, the language one speaks at home; one does not use it to write to the tax office, nor take one’s degree.
So if it doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect – if it doesn’t matter if a noun is masculine or feminine; if a verb falls to be transitive in the past perfect; if you just use the English word, because who can remember the Hindi for mathematics or apartment or transubstantiation – then for all I wage my small battle, we’re losing the war. To speak our language perfectly – to choose to do so, despite decades of colonial influence – is another political act.
It would be easier to preserve Gaelic, my tutor notes with some resignation, if it weren’t so fiendishly difficult.
“Tha mi a’fuireach ann am Barraigh,” says another of my classmates. “I live on Barra. But I’m going to Mull. Ach tha mi a’dol a’Mhuile. Muile. Mhuile. Fuck it. I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to live on Barra forever.”
But it’s a matter of practice. After a few days of listening and learning, I find I can order elevenses at the campus café, and understand that the sign in the bathroom is telling me not to flush tampons down the toilet. Looking out over the harbour, I suddenly grasp the meaning of the Gaelic word glas, not grey or green but in-between, the colour of the sea beneath a turbulent sky. Gaelic holds the Highland landscape in the weft of it, the sound of running water in its flow and fall. It demands time and hard work, but that denotation of beauty will become a part of me.
On day four, my friend and I buy a whole plate of scones by mistake.
“I think,” I say, after a while, “that plurals start at three.”
“It’s fine,” she says, clapping me on the shoulder. “I need the food, I’m living on Barra forever.”
My family are priests and academics. They are scholars of a language I don’t speak.
But here’s something I wish I’d known earlier. Hindi, like Sanskrit before it and several other modern Indian languages, is written in Devanagari script. My grandfather, a native Hindi speaker, taught himself the alphabet in his thirties. He had been to school during the British Raj, so he had never learned.
On my last night on Skye, there’s a ceilidh, raucous and wonderful, the dancers twirling through the long northern twilight. Just before midnight, a storm hits the coastline with a shattering violence. Before the party breaks up, someone brings the news everyone expected: there won’t be any ferry sailings tomorrow. I’m not going to be able to leave the island on schedule, and I’ll miss my rail connection on the other side.
I’m still blurry with the promised rosé, grasping at possible options, when one of my classmates comes to find me. If I can be ready to go straight after class, she says, I can come with her in the car over the Skye Bridge, and by way of a hundred-mile detour through the Highlands, we can make it to Fort William before the last train rattles through. Thanks to her kindness, I will reach Glasgow only a few hours later than planned, and in time to meet the southbound connection in the morning.
“Tapadh leat, a ghràidh,” I say, with sincere and heartfelt gratitude, and then with wonder, as the words come to me without thinking. Despite everything – despite the encroach, decline and forgetting; despite the relentless pressure of history – it is still a living language. I am sparkling with pink wine, battered by the oncoming storm, thousands of miles from where I come from: but it lives with me.
Here’s how the story is supposed to end. That because I went in search of another colonised language, my own comes easier to me; that what was lost can be found.
But that’s not how it goes. Gaelic will never have monolingual speakers again. My native language is gone forever. Relearning it is possible; decolonisation of the mind is possible. But I have been changed, first by the forgetting and the relearning. What is left is post-glacial, a landscape irrevocably altered.
I have a Hindi teacher I like these days. She talks about tenses and conjugations, oblique noun cases, the inflection of postpositions. She thinks my grammar leaves a great deal to be desired. She doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with me.
“Where were you during the holiday?” she asks, in Hindi.
“I was on Skye, to learn Gaelic.”
I don’t know how best to say it in Hindi, so I use the Gaelic word: Gàidhlig. It is a language, I explain, that they speak in the high places of Scotland. It is very beautiful. People are afraid it will be forgotten, so they are working hard to remember it. I am one of those people.
That was very good, my Hindi teacher says, but you can do better.
I know I can. We go on.
I SAW THE TITLE OF THIS AND THOUGHT, “THAT REMINDS ME OF IONA”. (sorry, you are very recognisable)
<3
(PS This was beautiful and thought-provoking.)
This is beautiful, thank you. I’m going to share it with my husband, whose father speaks a dialect of Serbian & whose children speak it clumsily. I’ve been hesitant to try harder to learn it bc I’m afraid of being bad at it, being laughed at. This is an inspiring piece though. I’m glad you have good teachers, and friends.
This is very beautiful and my arms got goose-bumpy as I read.
Oh, this spoke to me so much. My grandmother was fluent in Spanish; my mother mostly. I am not, and the idea of going places and being terrified of my own ignorance in a language that is supposedly my own is something I achingly understand. Thank you for writing this; it was wonderful.
This, exactly.
Yes! I am reading and studying all the Spanish I can in a place with next to no Spanish-speaking population, because my abuela is gone and that’s something I can share with her, a little, somehow.
Spanish is an interesting case because it’s a language of colonization, too. How many other languages did my distant ancestors in Cuba speak? Or even more distant ancestors in a pre-Roman Spain?
Beautiful!
I am Irish and very conscious of how rusty my grasp on the language has become and this essay has pierced the heart of me, it’s beautiful.
This is great.
This is beautiful, thank you for writing it! I love hearing about other people who also struggle with the languages of their birthplaces or their families’ birthplaces.
Fascinating stuff, thanks for sharing! I only left Scotland a few months ago and I’m already ready for another ceilidh (although the English really are terrible at it haha!)
This is so complex and nuanced and wise and generous. Thank you.
I spend a lot of time thinking about language because of my job. A lot of the kids I work with are bilingual in English and Chinese, but not… I know there’s another word for it, where they know how to speak Chinese but not write or read it. They speak it at home and with each other in the halls but aside from the few that also go to Chinese school on the weekends. they only know how to write very basic things, if anything. I have a little spot on one of my boards where we do a Word of the Week, and write the same word in English, Spanish, and Chinese. I always ask the kids for help writing the Chinese word because I think it’s important that they see even though I am the teacher there are still things they can teach me, things they can do that I can’t. I’m teaching them how to read and write in English but I always hope they know how important it is that they can speak Chinese, too, that we can all learn from one another.
My reading and writing in Turkish is elementary level and my speaking is semi-fluent, but I know the humiliation of messing up words I should know. I hope to write in my first language someday. It’s just hard when you’re not surrounded by it.
This was great! As a language nerd and someone who works in languages, I often forget that I am lucky to have largely lost that fear of getting it wrong through necessity (make and check amends in files in 20 languages, 2 of which you actually speak? No worries! Hold conf calls between clients and linguists to discuss a text in Turkish? Sure).
But I do remember it even learning languages at school when everyone was new to it, we didn’t want to try and fail, so much easier not to try. I think I’ve almost gone the other way, which is also bad – my spoken French is so colloquial and littered with mistakes, and I kinda don’t care as long as I can talk as fast as I can in English.
What is your profession?! Sounds amazing!
I’m a project/account manager in a translation agency. I only really speak two languages but you learn that there’s speaking/understanding a language, and there’s being able to recognise patterns and know which word corresponds to the English source in a text. A lot of the time the latter is all I need!
Thank you for sharing these beautiful reflections!
“It would be easier to preserve Gaelic, my tutor notes with some resignation, if it weren’t so fiendishly difficult.”
My grandfather’s first language was Irish. He did not speak it at home with his children, but they learned it at school. They would make the mistake of going with some small question about their Irish homework to him, and he would find everything wrong with their attempts and insist on them spending hours working on it, as they were not thinking in Irish. Thinking in Irish is very different from thinking in English. (My dad and his siblings, lamentably, never got very good at thinking in Irish.)
This piece was lovely.
I think this is why learning a second language after acquisition of a first language is tricky: you’re always trying to put thoughts formulated in the first language into the second, and often it doesn’t work like that. You actually have different emotions and expressions in different languages, and they even affect how one sees and describes the world – some languages don’t distinguish between grey and blue, for instance, or others distinguish light blue from dark blue with completely different colour names (and so on).
One of the things that always struck me while working in a multi-national workplace was that it didn’t matter how good your English was, you could always tell someone’s first language by what they used to count in multiples. It’s like when you get to something that awkward you had to go back.
This is beautiful.
I’m reminded that my dad spoke French as a child but was encouraged to speak English instead, because his teachers told him speaking two languages would hurt him academically.
And my grandmother refused to speak to us in her Sicilian dialect.
My grandfather banned French at home (and insisted his name was Morris, not Maurice), so my father never really learned although it was his mother’s first language. His older sister got to learn it while my grandfather was at war in Korea, and my grandmother spoke it with her friends until the day she died. I studied it in school, but the textbook version was so far from her colloquial quebecois-via-milltown-Maine that we could never have a full conversation.
I have an 80-something acquaintance named Jorge whose parents were a South American and a WASP; he was never taught Spanish and pronounces his name “George” and is weirdly proud of his family’s . . . assimilation, or whatever that is. It makes me sad but it doesn’t seem to make him sad.
My favourite thing about is that in quebecois ‘Morris’ is actually a proper pronunciation of Maurice, just with the emphasis on a different syllable in English vs French. Spelling it Morris is probably the best way to get an anglo to pronounce it as a quebecois would (as opposed to the Parisian “more-eese”.)
Haha yes, I didn’t know him (he died when I was very young) but I get the impression he was the type to insist on very minor victories?
My Czech forebears killed their language in their households once on U.S. soil with a ferocity that’s peculiar and frustrating to us who came after. In high school and college I learned German as the closest I could get. Lately I have gone back to it, largely because it’s just easier than Czech, both in terms of access and previous study. I feel sheepish about it, and possibly I need to consider trying for both. Uch, effort.
My mother says her mother and grandmother would speak Czech to each other, but though she asked and asked they would never teach her. She thinks they liked to be able to speak openly in front of the children. As I grow older I realize what a gift that would have been to my mother, whom I’m sure would have passed it to me.
My wife’s grandmother visited Sicily in her later years (I forget if she was born there or if her parents had been recent immigrants), and attempted to get by speaking New York City Italian, which is largely a Sicilian dialect mixed with English and other southern Italian. But after Italian unification and radio and TV in the 20th century, most Italians even in the south speak a northern dialect these days, and she found it difficult to talk to people.
I grew up around a number of people whose parents or grandparents came from eastern Europe, and they’d grown up speaking English, because the other kids would beat up non-English-speakers. Sad. It’s much better in the places I’ve lived since then, between 1980s New Jersey where lots of people I know usually speak some language other than English to their kids, or here in California where there’s enough critical mass of Spanish and Mandarin for people who speak those languages to get by (though most of the old-timers here speak Cantonese, and Mandarin’s a second language for a lot of the immigrants as well.)
That’s really interesting, because nowadays it’s thought that speaking two languages actually helps academic performance. Kids educated at Gaelscoils in Eire (dual Irish Gaelic and English) do better in exams and end up performing better than those educated only in English-speaking schools, apparently.
Those schools also tend to be fee paying private schools full of middle class children, so there’s that too.
Maybe, but there are huge studies showing kids educated bilingually doing better than everyone else across all settings (Thomas and Collier, 97, US,is the big one).
Ah, that might be more of an explanation!
There are very few, if any, fee-paying private Gaelscoileanna in Ireland!
One example of a Gaelscoil that wouldn’t be full of middle-class children is Gaelscoil Bhaile Munna http://www.gaelscoilbhailemunna.ie/, but yes, Gaelscoileanna are popular with parents who are interested in their kids education, and that’s often a middle-class demographic.
Out of the three brothers, my grandfather assimilated to the United States the most. He didn’t teach his children to speak Greek or take them to Orthodox church or maintain his connections in the Cypriot community. So my father and his siblings were the only cousins that weren’t multilingual by the age of six, and now I am the only one who doesn’t speak any Greek at all, and it is really really weird to be part of the family but… on a very basic level unable to participate in the family itself because I don’t speak the language they’re most comfortable in.
I hear you, is what I’m saying, and this is amazing.
This is wonderful and also beautifully written, even though praising it when this is about the colonization of language feels a little fraught. Thank you.
(I need to find a Spanish teacher.)
As a native English speaker whose ancestors have been native English speakers for generations, I have nothing really significant to add to this. I do want to say, though, that I’ve always wanted to learn Gaelic but have never gotten around to it because it would be a “useless” language, especially in my current country (Korea). You’ve made me reconsider that, although I’m not really sure how to get started.
For Scots Gaelic, there’s a couple of programs that aired on TV that had attendant learning materials – the most recent was Speaking Our Language, which has I think DVDs/CDs available for purchase and it also looks like there are videos findable on Youtube for it. There was also my favorite, Can Seo, which is older and a little harder to find but has hilarious skits set on a shoestring and a soundstage (when the script called for a dog someone pushed a toy dog out, and when it called for a cat they used what I am 99% sure was a taxidermied cat). It also included episodes of the best soap opera, a tradition continued in Speaking our Language. Also, in addition to the school Iona mentions, Canada sometimes has language immersion weekends, because there’s a population of speakers there.
There’s an Irish course on Duolingo.com
I’m in Germany right now, studying for my German major. A lot of people, my dad included, don’t understand why this is so important to me that I would actually major in something as impractical as a language, but my mother is from Germany, her parents are from Germany, the rest of her family lives in Germany, and this language connects me to them.
My grandfather learned German in school and spoke it fluently (despite most of his heritage being Irish), so my mom also learned it in school, majored in it in college, and spoke it fluently. I learned it in school, did an intensive immersion program at 17 (the same one my mom did at 17), and kept studying it in college. I’m fairly fluent, though I lose some of it between my visits to Germany. I know what you mean about connecting the generations, even though my family adopted rather than inherited the language.
I minored in German and am not fluent by any means, but I studied it because my mom is from Germany. I am so so thankful that I did as my Oma and Opa slip back into German more and more as they age. I’m barely able to speak it, but I can understand them when they do, and that means a lot.
My German great-grandfather came to the US just before WW1. My grandmother says she never once heard him speak German when she was a child. My mother took it in school and he spoke it a little with her, but his dialect was strange and her German was rudimentary.
Obviously there were good reasons for him to assimilate, and German is hardly a language in need of preservation, but whenever I reconnect with various distant German cousins and their weird-dialect speaking grandparents I feel bad that it’s always them speaking English and my apologizing over my inability to properly conjugate adjectives despite years of study.
Beautifully written. I grew up bilingual (in former colonies, we still have to learn the colonialist’s languages for some reason). At 12, I moved to another African country where I had to learn 2 more languages. At 15, I moved to a European country where I had to learn yet another language. Suffice to say I don’t speak any languages like a native and I never will, not even my native language. But growing up mixing/blending languages (I use them more like paints than blocks) has made me less self-conscious, however I feel a bit handicapped when forced to use just one of them. The only time I can freely express myself to the full extent of my vocabulary is with my siblings because they speak the same languages. My parents/older siblings have grown used to our (especially me and my sister, as the youngest) rather special jargon and kindly correct us or teach us as needed. In that sense, I count myself lucky as although they tease, it doesn’t sting.
This didn’t make me want to learn Yiddish less, and it was also beautiful, to boot.
Related: anyone wanna learn Yiddish with me?? I think that would be a good Toast legacy.
I do! I do! My grandparents’ generation used Yiddish like a secret code, so it’s almost lost to my parents and me, but I want it back. My husband is Irish, and that language has been lost, too. My daughter is missing two languages of rebellion and insurgence, but only one’s on Duolingo, and it’s not Yiddish. How do we start?
Yeah, I mean, I want to learn it so I can use it as a secret code. Ideally with my husband, but he is just NOT playing ball. I have no idea how to make it happen, I was hoping someone here would, but man I want to learn more than I picked up from my grandmother so bad!!
My husband and I are learning Norwegian “just because.” We have no relation to Norway, we just like it a lot and I want to secret talk. (I say we, but it’s mostly me on Duolingo and then saying phrases at him until he gets it.. haha.)
this is absolutely lovely, thank you so much for writing it. one of my new favorites.
This is beautiful and excellent.
My grandpa and his parents came to the U.S. from Czechoslovakia. He married an American woman of Czech descent and taught Russian- which was by then colonizing Czechoslovakia- and eventually kind of assimilated. He always knew Czech and his kids picked up some bits, but by the time I came around all we knew was “ahoj,” “dobrý den,” and how to say “Dvořak” without embarrassing ourselves. I’m a Spanish major and I’m pretty good, I pick up languages pretty well, but I’ve had a Czech 101 book staring me in the face for 3 years. Suddenly my inability to roll R’s isn’t porque soy gringa, no es un problema real, but a glaring fault. I only know enough to know when it sounds wrong, and it sounds wrong when I say it.
Please teach me how to say “Dvořak” without embarrassing myself!
I wish I had more to add to this, but I am from a family who spoke only English in every generation I interacted with, so I cannot empathize, only sympathize.
The main thing to remember with any Slavic language is that consonants don’t necessarily need a vowel between them. People like to say “Duh-vore,” but it’s more like those weird fantasy names with apostrophes. Basically, D’vore-jacques, except the R sound slurs into the “zh” sound. Forvo.com has some recordings of native Czech speakers pronouncing it.
This was just lovely <3 Thank you for sharing.
This was so gorgeous. I’m going back to re-read it now.
ooh! I love this so much. Thank you for this.
“People are afraid it will be forgotten, so they are working hard to remember it. I am one of those people.
“That was very good, my Hindi teacher says, but you can do better.”
If there’s a better summation of everything that’s beautiful and difficult about language learning, I haven’t seen it. This whole piece is wonderful and has given me renewed courage to attempt Irish Gaelic before I lead a study abroad trip to Ireland next summer.
This piece is a gift. Thank you.
How beautiful, and thought provoking. Like many Americans I was raised wholly monolingual. I picked up French in middle/high school and college because it’s what you do as an arts student, and I was fairly good at it, but it was never something I particularly connected with (although I did love it more than the two semesters I spent slaving in German). I have tried off and on to pick up Irish and Gaelic, because those always spoke to me more (my family believed for the longest time that we had Celtic ancestry. We don’t. We are English to the bone. Both sides). But they, as well as Welsh, are truly fiendishly difficult. But so very worth it. This lovely piece made me want to try one more time.
This is how I feel. My family speaks only English on both sides in every generation I (remember having) met, even though (because?) one side is Irish with a little German and the other is Scottish with a little French. My husband is the same, only he’s all English with a little French. I took some French in high school and a little Russian in college.
I want to learn a new language, but honestly, I don’t feel particularly drawn to any of them (or rather, drawn to several of equal “uselessness” in my life), and I feel, “What’s the point?” I mean, sure, I could pick a language, but it would feel somewhat appropriative and also how would I practice? So here I sit in my monolingual American-ness, unsure how or why or what to learn.
The thing that studying other languages did for is is amplify my understanding of English. I never really understood objective case until I studied French. I used the objective case in English correctly, because I am a native speaker (with very strict English teachers), but only having to apply case to all the French pronouns made me realize WHY exactly “between Andrew and I” is so very wrong. I am terrible, terrible, terrible at other languages. They do not come to me easily. But five years of Spanish and four years of French means that I can read menus with confidence and titles of artworks on museum labels and signs in airports. Studying another language opens up a little window onto the rest of the world. I encourage you to pick any language, because it will expose you to the cultures of the counties where that language is spoken.
I also found that I have a slightly different personality in French or in Spanish! I am much more open. It is sometimes nice to abdicate responsibility for being eloquent. It’s comforting to be the fool. I am always a child in present tense in Spanish or French.
You can connect language-learning to aspects of your past (ancestors, history, past classes) or you can connect it to your desired future — a place you want to travel in deeply, books you want to read, cultural aspects you want to practice and maybe take on. Maybe thinking about it in relation to your future instead of your past will shake things up a little, and make it easier to gravitate to one language which does not feel “useless”?
It’s a great project — and a great way to keep the brain young, too! Don’t worry at all about being appropriative. It is just the reverse to learn a language well — it is entering into a culture by learning about it as much as possible and helping it grow through your very presence. Language and culture are (happily) very impure, growing, changing things!
“It matters because Hindi, like Gaelic, is a colonised space. It is a language complete in itself, with its own history, literature, poetry and tradition. But more than sixty-five years after Indian independence, it has been surrounded and absorbed by English, so among the Indian middle classes it is no longer a prestige language. It is the vernacular, the language one speaks at home; one does not use it to write to the tax office, nor take one’s degree.”
Oof. Right in the feels. I’m Filipino and you could make a similar (though by no means identical) observation about Tagalog.
This Glaswegian is now greeting into her dinner (thank you for this lovely piece)
Not only was this piece a punch in the gut about language, loss, colonization & identity, it was also *gorgeously* written. I look forward to following your work, Iona.
Anyone else want to go to Scotland now? I have lots of Scottish blood and have always wanted to learn Gaelic, but I always talk myself out of it (“it’s too difficult/I’d never get it” “you can only hold so many languages in your head, shouldn’t you go for one you can really use?”).
Are you in the US? My dad went hard in on Gaelic when I was younger, so I’ve been vaguely part of the Gaelic speaking/learning community on the East Coast, and it’s pretty great. Everyone is very enthused about new learners, and most everyone’s either amazing or wonderfully eccentric or both.
This piece was such a beautiful examination of the linguistic frameworks with which we define ourselves and approach the world. Thank you, Iona.
Tha sin glè mhath. Mòran taing.
I feel this, even though I’m English living in England and have no native language beyond this one. I have a lot of non-English heritage — Irishmen and Welshmen and Russian Jews — and I feel pretty disconnected with that heritage, not least because those aren’t my languages and my stories. I’m currently trying to learn Irish, largely because I want to study in Ireland and even if there weren’t entry requirements I’d feel pretty damn disrespectful, as an English person with all the history that entails, moving to a country like Ireland without even attempting to learn the language.
But it is fiendishly difficult, and lenition is evil, and I would probably end up living on Barra forever to avoid having to figure out how to say Mull in a different case. Gaelic languages use far too many letters and I’m terrible at grammar; it makes things complicatrd.
So much crying. Thank you for this.
This piece rang a bell inside me that I’ve been trying not to listen to.
I am a monolingual daughter of extremely mixed heritage. My paternal grandparents spoke eight languages between them – my living grandfather speaks two fluently. My maternal grandparents spoke at least three, and my mother speaks (now broken) Afrikaans alongside her English.
I am so sad that myself and the other descendants of my grandparents didn’t give us the gift of another language. I’m sad at the reasons they may have had for not passing it on – the need to assimilate inside of a racist country, the desire to have their children really ‘belong’ in their chosen home, the difficulty in keeping up a language when surrounded by another… I don’t know.
I’ve tried and failed to learn languages before, so I am not hopeful I will ever be more than monolingual, and I am not sure how I feel about that.
Hi Iona, loved your article. My father was Irish my mother is Armenian, I grew up in the UK but have lived all my adult life in Spain. I speak fluent Spanish and sometimes I forget that I’m not…I really do believe that my brain has been colonized and after watching so many programmes realting to the past in Spain it’s as if I had lived through it all and have made my own memories…I’m going to try to teach myself Irish this winter..as a homage to my father who died with alzheimers in his 80’s. He didn’t know who I was but could recite poetry in Irish which I wish I could have understood as he spoke so beautifully. I think when you learn a language you start to feel it with all the expressions you learn and the reasons behind them… It’s not going to be easy for me, but I have all the time in the world and of course there’s internet!!
That was really beautifully written, I really enjoyed reading it. There’s a lot there that I can relate to as a learner of Irish living in NE England – I’d never really come up against ‘politicised’ (or potentially politicised) language learning before I started learning it. One day I’ll get the hang of how colours work in Celtic languages!
Having mixed feelings even commenting on this in English.
I stopped thinking in Chinese a long time ago. I’ve wanted to try and read more in Chinese and actually take advantage of my fluency to engage with Chinese online communities, but… it always feels like something I ought to do because FUCK COLONIALISM and less because I’m drawn to it. The language still feels like home and I still do speak it, just… I don’t particularly desire texts made with it, anymore.
So thank you for awakening that urge in me again to be perfectly fluent in Chinese. Maybe dig up some novels I used to enjoy as a kid. Or if anyone has any recommendations, please, feel free.
This is such a beautiful piece, and it stirred so many of my feelings of regret at the way generations of immigrants in America have chosen- for understandable but depressing reasons- not to pass their native languages to their children, sacrificing such a fundamental part of their own identities and understanding of the world on the altar of assimilation and survival for their families.
I imagine my great-grandparents, 3/4 of which were not from English-speaking countries, speaking to their children only in a language that they learned imperfectly as adults out of necessity. There is so much sorrow in the thought of everything that was lost in the translation.
Every so often I read something that reignites my desire to finally learn Lithuanian, the language of my father’s parents (and my father’s first language). I wanted to learn even as a child, but my dad wasn’t confident enough to teach me even though he spoke no English until the age of 5 – he always says he speaks like a 5 year old would. To an outsider that speaks only about 6 words though, he sounds fluent enough to me at family events. It’s also supposed to be fiendishly difficult to learn and there aren’t very many resources outside the country. There is an introductory Pimsleur lesson though, so I think I’ll start there. Realistically I know I’ll never be fluent, but it would be nice to surprise my grandmother with basic conversation.
“(I wanted someone to say: there’s nothing wrong with you. Instead, my relations clapped their hands and summoned everyone in the house. “Guys! Come and listen to the cutest mistake she just made!”)”
I’ve been outright laughed at by family; the fear is real.
Celtic languages are difficult in terms of spelling for English speakers… and then there’s the way the verb nearly always come first… BRB checking out the ‘Gaidhlig for Irish speakers’ on the Sabhal Mor Ostaig site.
My grandmother is from former Moravia which is now the Czech Republic. They had to flee after the war because my great-grandmother, and therefore her children too, were members of the German speaking population. Her husband, my “”real”” great-grandfather (long story), wasn’t though, so during the first years while he perfected his German, they spoke only Czech. After my family arrived in Germany, they decided against having the children learn Czech, the language of the people who took their home from them, literally and figuratively.
I would have really loved to have this part of our families culture live on, but it’s kind of lost now, with my great-grandmother being dead since 2001. I could learn it at university, but I’m not quite sure how my grandma would react. She doesn’t even go further into the country than the Duty Free-Shop at the border.
I can so relate, my father was from the now former Yugoslavia and wouldn’t teach us Serbo-Croatian because he too felt betrayed by his homeland on many levels.
This was beautiful. I’m amazed at how many of us have similar stories of immigration and then loss of language which impacts how we relate to our family’s culture and history. My great-grandparents came from Italy in the early 1900s and my grandparents speak Italian. But they didn’t teach their kids for all the above reasons — they wanted their kids to be “real Americans” and they also wanted to gossip without the kids understanding. So my parents grew up knowing some common words and slang (and the food of course), but my cousins and I barely have that. And my own mother died decades ago and all the little words she used to use with us are just gone now. I don’t have any left in my memory to use with my own child. Being Italian-American is so important to my identity, but I sometimes wonder if I can really claim the title being so distant from that heritage. Thanks for this essay.
I have a lot of pain, guilt and shame associated with Irish (Geailge). I cannot speak a lick of it despite 10 years of study, because it was beaten into me and used as cruel and unusual punishment by awful teachers (I had some particularly terrible teachers, but its also taught terribly in Ireland and a lot of children feel like its a stupid burden and will do anything to get an Irish exemption). To the point that for a long time I had a visceral hatred for the language, even now I find it an ugly language to listen too and it brings up feelings off annoyance and anger in me. My feelings are changing, as is my whole attitude to Ireland because I don’t live there anymore, but the painful associations are still there and they were made early and put in deep roots.
Irish is completely wrapped up in our history and occupation by the English, but also there’s class lines and status associations in modern Ireland. Weirdly, at least in Eastern Ireland, its flipped from being a language of the poor/working classes (because if you were rich you went to English run schools), to being a language that’s only really embraced by the middle classes who can afford the private Irish language schools and see it as a real status symbol that little Taigh can speak As Geailge. (There are some public Irish language schools, but they’re rare, and the Irish curriculum in the rest of the public schools can be lacking, it definitely was when I went to school.)
Can you name some of these mythical “private” Irish language schools? There are very few “private” schools in Ireland of any sort, and I don’t think any of them are Gaelscoileanna! There are over 30 Irish language Primary schools in Dublin alone, and they’re all just ordinary National Schools that teach the same curriculum as every other National School, they just do it through the medium of Irish.
Bhain me an taithneamh as an sceal Iona…..”Mol an Óige agus tiochfaidh sí”
We are soul sisters! I grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada around Gaelic, but never properly learned to speak in it as I was part of a lost generation in transmission. All my life I ached to learn my native blas, but was afraid for all the reasons you mentioned about Hindi. I am a professional musician now living in Vancouver, Canada (west coast) and about 7-8 years ago I started studying the Raga system with a lady from Pune. I was singing in Hindi and started to learn Sanskrit. It was on a trip to India with Neeraja at a week long Hindustani music festival I realized that I held the keys to my own culture as I was raised with the songs, music, dance and some language. I thought, “well if I can learn to sing in Hindi and Sanskrit I can learn my own language”! I have been in full on Gaelic mode for the past 4 years and now have a career as a Gaelic singer at last. My heart is at peace. Namascar
One of the most beautiful and eloquently written articles on this I have ever read. You have very important contributions to make to the current debate around the Brains case and I hope you will consider submitting something to The National one day soon. Also devastated to hear about what’s happening to Hindi in India – if such things can happen even to Hindi, we all, everyone of us, might fight that much harder to ensure our children and communities are aware of these beautiful ancient and incredible languages that carry so much history and identity for us and need to be used and promoted in all contemporary contexts as much as possible
Fascinating, thought-provoking and well-written. It’s good to hear that you enjoyed your time at SMO, and it was nice to meet you there. Good luck with the Gaelic and Hindi. Keep at it and don’t let your mistakes worry you too much.
Lovely. My great great great grandmother was a Highlander who married a man who wouldn’t allow her to speak ‘gibberish’ (Gaelic).
That was so beautiful and heart-touching.
This was so beautiful, I could almost cry. My family lost everything in the whole "immigration to the states and becoming White" thing, being Irish and Canadian-Gaelic on one side and then Italian on the other.
My grandfather, despite being literally from Italy, refused to teach my mother Italian. "We speak English in this country, you must be Americanized". I sometimes wonder if he ever learned either, coming over so young. All she learned were commands, bit words and the like from his mother, who spoke basically no English.
It's practically ridiculous that simply trying to learn the languages of our families and people, and even the languages of others, has become a political act of defiance. And yet, here we are.
I’m crying at my desk at work and it isn’t fair.
(My father, monolingual my whole life, refused to learn the languages that would allow him to communicate with my mother’s family. He had four to choose from. I will never forgive him.)
I'm crying at my desk at work and it isn't fair.
(My father, monolingual my whole life, refused to learn the languages that would allow him to communicate with my mother's family. He had four to choose from. I will never forgive him.)
This is such a very wonderful piece. Thank you so much for speaking to the potency of the Mother tongue and the inherent identity found in language. As deep as our blood flows in our veins and connects us to where we come from, so language does even more so. My parents and grandmother were immigrants and each spoke 5-7 languages. My mother rolled her eyes about America’s single language trajectory and I always thought I would know a few as an adult. I used to speak French with my grandmother all day every Sunday as a child, but it still didn’t give me a fluency and now after many years of non-use it’s pretty sketchy. I really believe that the knowing of more than one language creates a kind of confluency in us that is truly a kind of inner diversity. It was not lost on me, that in Bel Canto, the most important person was the translator, the person who could speak everyone’s language. And although I am not aware of Gaelic as part of my cultural lineage, it affects me so deeply when I hear it or sing it. I often can’t sing through the tears. What is it about the power of those sounds? Thank you again for this gorgeously written piece.
This is a wonderful article. Thank you.