Language City

PREFACE

The Limits of My Language

Don't ask a linguist how many languages they speak.

Some may blurt out a number just to change the subject ("Fifteen!"), but then people usually want a list, even a quick performance. Rattling off the names of unfamiliar languages tends to end the conversation quickly. Many linguists are extraordinary polyglots, like Roman Jakobson, who is said to have been dazed after an accident and started calling for help in the twenty-five he knew. But most linguists study Language, not languages.

Every one of us has a linguistic history, however buried or unexamined. Here, very briefly, is mine. Like most Americans, my family left behind its original languages, moving closer to Dominant American English with every generation.1 My great-grandma Bessy, who sold corsets in Queens and was known as The General, crossed the ocean by herself at the age of sixteen ("an unaccompanied minor," they would say today). Bessy could get by in Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, and, starting on the boat, heavily accented English. It was more or less the same with my other seven great-grandparents, all multilingual Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe with little formal schooling who sailed in steerage into New York Harbor around 1900. Their children, my grandparents, grew up first with Yiddish, seasoned only with bits of the other languages, before shifting wholesale to the New York Jewish English that reigned in Brooklyn and the Bronx in the 1920s and '30s. Despite some telltale tics, my parents tacked hard toward the "accent from nowhere" inculcated at school, piped in by TV, and pushed in a thousand ways, overtly and covertly, in the fast- assimilating neighborhoods and suburbs of the mid-twentieth century city.

I grew up with the privilege of Dominant American English, only a trace of the New York inflection, but I longed for other languages. A city of unprecedented linguistic diversity was rising all around me, although I didn't know it at the time. My chance to become bi- or multilingual-at least to sound like a native speaker, even with a second-grade vocabulary-came and went with the "critical period" before adolescence.2 "Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt," wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. So fundamental were my limits that I was hardly aware of them.

Second-language classes started when I was eleven, later than almost anywhere else in the world.3 Like many monolinguals, I saw them as a graded game confined to school, not a fundamental imperative for living. At the same time, linguistic hierarchies were impossible to miss. Unconsciously I had learned to register most other forms of English as somehow lesser. Now I sensed the same with Spanish, which wasn't offered at school despite being both the city's and the country's second language, crucial for anyone hoping to feel at home in the hemisphere. In theory it was Cervantes and Salamanca, but in practice it was a working-class, immigrant, brown-skinned language at the bottom of the social hierarchy, often spoken at a lower volume when Anglophones were around.

French, on the other hand, was required. Its lingering elite prestige goes back almost a thousand years, when a small group of Norman French speakers conquered a large group of diversely dialected Old English speakers. That's how the resulting hybrid language ended up with different words for animals in the field (Old English-derived cow, pig, sheep, deer) versus on the plate (French-derived beef, pork, mutton, venison). Century after century, Middle and Modern English were continually forged through French, including not only words like elite and prestige but lake, mountain, flower, and thousands of others which now seem impeccably English. Like many English speakers, I heard both elegance and arrogance in the roll of French uvular /r/ or a cascade of nasal vowels.4 I learned to say je ne sais quoi and raison d'être, correctly but not too correctly, not to show I knew French but to show I was a certain kind of English speaker.5

Classes in "dead languages" also fed a certain kind of English. Latin and Ancient Greek appeared as codes to crack, things to master, lists to memorize and unlock worlds. A smattering of Hebrew at Hebrew school was neither fully dead nor really alive, poised uncertainly between the ancient and modern languages. It felt safer to explore a language if there was no one you could speak it to. If reading is about pressing headlong and half-conscious into a mess of meaning, we didn't even read so much as decipher, where it's the romance of a person alone in a room-Champollion with the hieroglyphs, Ventris the architect tinkering with Linear B after work-incommunicado while cracking ancient communication. Language as form, which is the beginning of linguistics.

In college, I tried inhaling Old Norse, Uighur, Luo, Russian, and Arabic, racing like a bucket-list traveler to stamp the pages of my linguistic passport. Above all I threw myself into Mandarin, keen to go up against its proverbial difficulty.6 Speakers themselves now know it as guóyu national language, putónghuà common speech, zhongwén, or hànyu Han/Chinese language, but Europeans call it Mandarin from an old Indic word for counsel (same root as mantra) that passed through Portuguese in the seventeenth century and came to mean a type of orange, a senior official, the icy detachment of such officials, and eventually the form of Chinese those officials spoke, guanhuà. Just one of countless spoken varieties under the heading of "Chinese,"7 Mandarin is still distinguished in part by its strangely officious flavor, now with a Communist twist: "simultaneously austere and vacuous, intimidating yet elusive, in short stuffy and puffy at the same time," as Perry Link puts it.8

A year into classes, I could barely string together a sentence, but my conception of human language was already wonderfully warped beyond recognition. There seemed to be native words for everything, and few clear cognates with or borrowings from other languages. There were complex tones: putting the mantra back in Mandarin, I would play an audio file on loop and mutter the same syllable hundreds of times: ma má ma mà . . . There were chéngyu, the elaborate, the elaborate four-syllable phrases derived from Classical Chinese but often used in contemporary speech, distilling poetry and wisdom into the tiniest spaces: yiyè zhiqiu. From one leaf's fall, you know that it's autumn. From a single sign comes the wider revelation.

As for reading and writing-over fifty thousand characters attested across a three-thousand-year written tradition-you're not sufficiently obsessed until you're constantly tracing them with a wagging finger in the air, each stroke in the proper order. Far from being ideograms that represent meanings directly through images, characters are intricately entangled with the spoken language. Basic literacy is sometimes said to mean memorizing a minimum of three thousand, which is still no guarantee of being able to read a newspaper article.

I moved to Beijing for six months of full-time language study, under a pledge to speak English only on phone calls home. By then I could carry on a conversation, exhausting myself in the process, but it was easier to discuss economic development than to give directions. I still bludgeoned every other sentence, could only dream of nuance, and was haunted by the feeling, in the city's cold smoky beauty, that I was just translating from the nonstop English ticker running through my head. Even when I did (almost) sound like a native speaker, did it make any sense for me to sound that way? For the first but not the last time, I faced the unmistakable connection between language, identity, and appearance. Mandarin may eventually become a global language beyond the global Chinese diaspora, but for now anyone who speaks it without looking Chinese is a curiosity, an anomaly, a question mark. Reactions veer quickly from total incomprehension to overblown praise, while Chinese Americans are unfairly expected to be fluent.

One day in Beijing, I went to a talk by the legendary Chinese linguist Sun Hóngkai. At first I was just trying to keep up with his Mandarin. Only gradually did I grasp the life's work he was describing: half a century spent documenting as many of China's approximately 300 languages as possible (hardly counting forms of Chinese). That was also the first time I heard the phrase endangered languages ( binwei yuyán).

A few years later, with a little linguistics, I went to southwest China, as Professor Sun had.9 Chasing leads from scholars and street vendors, I took buses and shared jeeps from valley to valley across mountainous Yunnan province, home to over a hundred languages. Finally I came to Gongshan, the tiny seat of one of China's poorest counties. In this new frontier town of already rotting buildings, Han Chinese settlers were setting up shop and minority groups from surrounding villages were coming in search of work, education, health care,...