Julie Sedivy quotes James in a poignant context in her new book “Memory Speaks”. She was whisked from Czechoslovakia with her family at the age of two, settling eventually in Montreal. In her new home she became proficient in French and English, and later became a scholar in the psychology of language. But she nearly lost her first language, Czech, before returning to it in adulthood. Her book is at once an eloquent memoir, a wide-ranging commentary on cultural diversity and an expert distillation of the research on language learning, loss and recovery.
Her story is sadly typical. Youngsters use the child’s plastic brain to learn the language of an adoptive country with what often seems astonishing speed. Before long it seems to promise acceptance and opportunity, while their parents’ language becomes irrelevant or embarrassing, something used only by old people from a faraway place. The parents’ questions in their home language are answered impatiently in the new one, the children coming to regard their elders as out-of-touch simpletons who struggle to complete basic tasks.
For their part, meanwhile, the parents cannot lead the subtle, difficult conversations that guide their offspring as they grow. As the children’s heritage language atrophies, the two generations find it harder and harder to talk about anything at all.
Children often yearn desperately to fit in. Often this can mean not only learning the new language, but avoiding putting off potential friends with the old. Children, alas, can also be little bigots. At the age of five, researchers have found, they already express a preference for hypothetical playmates of the same race as them. They also prefer friends who speak only their language over those who speak a second one as well.
In theory, keeping a language robust once uprooted from its native environment is possible. But that requires the continuance of a rich and varied input throughout a child’s development—not just from parents, but through activities, experiences, books and media. These are often not available in countries of arrival. Parents are themselves pressed to speak in the new language to their children, despite evidence that their ungrammatical and halting efforts are not much help.
But a dimming language may not be as profoundly lost as speakers fear when, as adults, they visit elderly relatives or their home countries and can barely produce a sentence. Though the language may not be as retrievable as it once was, with time and exposure it can be relearned far faster than if starting from scratch.
This depends, naturally, on the length of time someone spent speaking their first language as a child. Those who are older when they emigrate may keep their languages without great effort (though none is entirely safe from attrition). Those who leave at younger ages may find their grasp of grammar weakening, but will still have a large dormant vocabulary that can be reawakened, and are likely to speak with a near-native accent when they do. Most remarkably, even children adopted across international borders in the first years of life, before they can properly speak themselves, show enhanced ability to learn sounds that are native to their birth-country languages, after not hearing them for most of their lives.
Many bilingual people report feeling that they have different personalities in their different languages; overwhelmingly they say that their first language is the one most imbued with emotion. It is scarcely surprising that losing a mother-tongue leaves behind an ache like that of a phantom limb.
The official pressure on newcomers to abandon their old languages used to be much worse. Today, some democracies with long histories of immigration try to be more accommodating. Schools may bolster pupils’ multilingualism by, for example, getting them to write stories or poems in their home languages and explain them to the class. Such symbolic support shows the children that they are not considered divided souls or outsiders, but full members of their new communities—and ones blessed with a precious gift.
Source: we have found this article on the website of The Economist. It also appeared in the print edition of 29 January under the headline « Remembrance of times past »