My Family Language Stories
Hello my Fluent readers!
Welcome to my blog - where I share with you my stories about multilingual parenting.
Today I want to tell you stories about the languages my family speaks.
My small munchkin speaks 2 languages fluently (English, French) and two more in bits and pieces (Arabic and German). How interesting that governmental funding has played a significant role on what languages my son is able to speak fluently! (Hint hint, government!.)
I am so fortunate that my husband speaks French, "Fsha" (Modern Standard Arabic) and Mgrib (Moroccan Arabic). Growing up in Morocco has allowed SaÏd to learn his Sidi Kacem dialect (featured in all of my books translated into Moroccan Arabic). Arabiiya Mgrib is a local treasure - Moroccans can understand everyone else in the Arab world but no one can understand them. How fun is that? In schools he was able to pick up Modern Standard Arabic - though, to be honest, no one really speaks that language, save the people on the news. French is a class marker in Morocco and necessary for a lot of privileged things like University and migration to Canada. He also allegedly speaks better German than I do, from incessant soccer viewing. The guy is a hard core polyglot. Trilingual at an absolute minimum.
No one is comparing anyone right now… And yet I must admit, I am the language poor of my family. I know a few words in quite a few languages and I once took a philosophy course in Berlin, whereby my language level was high enough that I learned about (for the first time in my life) and engaged in conversations about "Kommunismus" (communism). Those East Berliners know a thing or two about that topic. It is a linguistic experience I highly recommend! It should be noted that the beginnings of my German language ability was conveyed to me by my mother through more useful German phrases, such as "lulu machen" (go pee pee) and "Zahne Putzen" (brush your teeth).
This story would not be complete with out the very powerful childhood experience that led me on a journey to be obsessed with languages. It begins with two very important people; my parents. As a child my parents would regularly discuss parental strategy in front of us. At first they began with spelling - and since I did not learn to read effectively until I was in Grade 3, this strategy worked for a very long and overdue time. However - I did eventually learn how to spell and my brother caught up with me. This meant that they could no longer convey meaning *secretly* to each other in our presence. For a whole year before I was born my parents lived in Japan together. There, they learned pottery and a more importantly, a vital parental skill, the Japanese Language. As a child they would speak about us, in Japanese, at the dinner table. I almost became a psychic I wanted to know what they were saying so badly. Instead I spent a life time trying to learn all the languages so no one could ever talk about me behind my back right in front of me ever again!
Thank you mom and dad - as it turns out my language obsession has a much more useful purpose. Having spend so many years and money trying to learn languages, I now know how languages work contextually. This gives me the ability to arrange 10 different languages (each with its own quirks and often script) in one book.
I am delighted to get to work with languages each day! Nothing is more fun than learning about how a language works - or better yet - to know enough of the languages to gain insight from a unique cultural perspective. #BestJobInTheWorld
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