I’ve always wanted to speak a foreign language, to speak one properly, fluently as if I was a native. I’ve been trying for a long time, ever since I was at school. I’ve dabbled in French, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese and even Esperanto yet I’ve never given any of the more exotic tongues a try, such as Mandarin. I did once try to strike up a conversation with a taxi driver in Guajarati following a drunken trip to York races but that’s a whole different story.
During my working life I have given a presentation in French, to a French audience and have managed to read books in French and Spanish, so I at least I have persevered. I would say that I’m relatively proficient in Spanish now. My latest venture is to learn Dutch, why I do not know.
I keep trying but never quite get there, primarily as I never really get the opportunity to practice in an environment where English is not there to rescue me but secondly because learning a language is hard. It can be very hard. The sounds are different, the words are different and the rules are not what you might expect.
But languages have a real beauty for me, not just in their structure and formation but in that they describe the human journey. The whole of human history is told in the languages that we use and I think that that is why I carry on.
Europe, for example is dominated by the influence of Latin and Greek yet there is a definite line between the more northern ‘Slavic’ languages and the more southern ‘Latin’ tongues. The Celtic languages have been kept alive only in small pockets on the western fringes of the continent. The Iberian Peninsula has been split as if a dyke had burst and Spanish had flooded in between Catalan and Portuguese. And then there are the odd-ball (?) languages like Finnish and Hungarian which don’t quite fit in with anything else. Why?
Outside Europe the world is peppered with the languages of its colonial past, French and Dutch in parts of Africa, Spanish and Portuguese in South America and of course English in the USA. They tell the story of modern man, his conquests, his successes, his travails and his travels. Our languages are like human sub species caught in their own evolutionary process. Some prosper and spread while others wither and die and others cling on in remote areas. Others are found on stones or on papyrus, long since dead but trapped like the fossils they are.
The story of our languages’ is our own story. It’s a fascinating tale and one that never ceases to captivate me. Ah well, back to my Dutch. Gelukkig Nieuwjaar.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 