Love Affairs

I have been trying to trace my long and neverending devotion to the idea of language lately and have encountered a few wonderful memories. This is not a coherent post (what's new?) but it might be a fun retrospective.

The first non-English words I ever learned were from Lakota Sioux at age 4, from what would be my favorite movie for many, many years- Dances with Wolves. I can still feel the magic in the moment when Shumani Tutonka Owachi and Kicking Bird have their first linguistic breakthrough with the term for buffalo (tatanka, as we all know). I watched, rapt, as Stands With a Fist tearfully struggled to revive a language that was dead in her and wondered, "How? How can a language just die in you?" I fell in love with the idea that someone could give you a new name and it transformed you into a new person. I would watch that movie over and over and repeat to the television the words I thought I could understand- Pilama yelo! Wasichu, wasichu! A baby linguist was born- I had a taste, and I was hooked.

Then in kindergarten I was actually in the same class as someone who spoke a language other than English. Our language lessons began immediately upon my bullying demand with lunchroom foods and quickly progressed to other pressing topics such as clothing, animals, colors and numbers. It was Spanish, and I was in love.

In elementary school, my grandparents moved to Kenya and learned Swahili. I didn't want to go to Africa, but I felt that it was unfair of them to learn Swahili while I still had to speak plain English. When they returned a few years later, I spent hours laying on the floor in the music room (yes, my grandparents have a huge room dedicated to music) listening to their Swahili tapes and reading the accompanying manual. I don't remember this, but my mother swears that soon after this, a missionary from Kenya came to our small-town Texas church and I walked up to him and started chattering at him in Swahili (thanks mom!).

Fast forward to today- my entire life revolves around language; thinking about it, sharing it, recording it, learning about it, playing with it, listening to it, loving it. This semester is already shaping up to be the hardest thing that I have ever done, but I think I'm doing it right.


(P.S. Special thanks to my parents and siblings for either teaching me to read REALLY early, or reading the subtitles to Dances With Wolves to me until I had them memorized, and for covering my eyes during the violent/scary/sexy parts. I was four for crying out loud.)