I grew up in a bilingual household and a multilingual community.
My family speaks a mixture of Kannada and English at home. The priests at the local temple speak Tamil to each other and Sanskrit to the gods. In the latest Bollywood film, the impossibly beautiful couple lip-syncs songs in Hindi, inserting Persian, Urdu and English lyrics as they please: a highly unusual combination translated at the bottom of the screen with rolling subtitles of broken English. My neighbors speak Bengali, Italian, Korean and Chinese, each language more exotic and unintelligible, beautiful and confusing and frustrating and enchanting than the others.
Just two weeks into my freshman year here, I found inspiration in a dark corner of the fourth floor of Perkins Library. It was an orange and gray book, thick and dusty. The front cover had a title in two languages—one in English, and the second in the familiar loops of my family’s native language. Kannada-Inglish Nighantu. Kannada-English Dictionary.
I opened to the introduction and found my great uncle’s smiling, wrinkled face looking back at me. He spent his entire career translating the beautiful, but limited, world of Kannada into English. As I flipped through the thousands of definitions, so painstakingly assembled, I thought about how this was completed by a mind wholly absorbed in both Indian and Western literatures.
I couldn’t help but see his massive project mirrored in my experience as an Indian-American—translating between worlds, at once immersed in and separate from both.
The first language I ever used as a child was Kannada, and I learned about my world through that lens. I chased after the yellow chitte(butterfly) in our backyard garden and I cried for haalu (milk) when I was thirsty. My grandmother, my ajji, taught me how to speak and my father, my thande, taught me how to write the curves of our script. My Indian classical vocal guru has trained me from suburban New Jersey to urban Bangalore, and I cut my teeth on the immensely rich tradition of medieval Kannada devotional poetry. I still know my brother only as anna (elder brother).
So my entire life has been consumed with translating from one world to the other—creating a Kannada-English “dictionary” of my experience. Those of us who are caught between two cultures don’t only translate within one world; we translate between worlds.
Despite learning about multilingualism in the classroom, I still ache to understand how my brain works. Everyone’s experience learning and using language is radically different, so each of us deals with it in totally unique ways.
One of my friends is so terrified of forgetting her mother tongue that she devours Spanish romance novels. Another has embraced his ABC (American-Born Chinese) status and refuses to speak Mandarin. A third friend is a fourth-generation Japanese-American who can’t speak a full sentence of the language but ferociously follows Japanese pop culture.
Foreign-language-speaking descendants of immigrants are, in linguistics parlance, “heritage language” speakers. The U.S. has a large population of heritage language speakers, but it is not unique in that respect.
Non-indigenous Latin Americans, for example, come from all corners of the Eastern Hemisphere. Yet within a few generations, the children of these immigrants started speaking Spanish exclusively and began identifying themselves primarily as Hispanic, rather than Italian-Argentinean, like Lionel Messi, or Lebanese-Mexican, like Salma Hayek. But members of visible minorities, like Peru’s ex-president Alberto Fujimori, a Japanese-Peruvian, are often still identified with the hyphenated term, even if they don’t speak their heritage language any longer.
The U.S. seems to embrace monolingualism as enthusiastically as apple pie, so we don’t always get the same encouragement to learn other languages as citizens of other countries do. Europeans are usually multilingual—Scandinavians, in particular, could school us in English grammar. In many African countries and in India, dozens of languages might be spoken within one state’s borders. We might even think of multilingualism as the norm and monolingualism as unusual, rather than the other way around.
Becoming multilingual is difficult, I think, not only because of the time involved in learning a second or third language, but also because a language is the repository of a culture. We spend our entire lives learning about our own native culture, let alone others.
But being multilingual is also difficult. For those of us who belong to two or more cultures, we have to work to earn membership in different worlds. Despite our best efforts, we might not ever feel completely at home in any of them.
It’s unrealistic for me to expect that everyone should become multilingual. Learning new languages is great, but not everyone has the time or the resources to do so. The global near-ubiquity of English has made multilingualism almost unnecessary for Americans.
But maybe there is still something beautiful about the effort of keeping many different language lenses in focus.
Since my parents arrived only 30 years ago, my family hasn’t completely melted into the American pot yet. My children and grandchildren might not either, whether because of the color of their skin or the fact that they’ll celebrate Holi instead of Easter in the spring.
But when it gets cloudy in late March, I hope my grandchildren, just like me, taste rich, thick sweetness in a spring rain because hani (drizzle) and “honey” sound exactly the same.
Sandeep is a Trinity senior and a Program II major studying the dynamics of language. His column runs every other Thursday.
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