What does it mean to be multilingual? At the most basic level, we all are. If you speak English, if you have ever been to a ballet or seen an alligator. If you’ve ever talked about your angst or ennui, played a guitar, smoked marijuana, sipped champagne on a yacht or studied algebra in the boondocks, you have already been speaking the language of the other. “English,” this solid behemoth that depending on your politics should either be preserved or purged, is actually, when you cut it open, quite a shape-shifter. What is English? A relative newcomer to the club of languages, (in use a mere 1400 years compared to truly ancient tongues like Tamil which reach back to the third century BCE) and not all that original: Mostly German, Latin and French with some Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit.
But even if you’re not a linguist and even if you don’t speak anything other than this closeted polyglot called English, you are probably still speaking in tongues. Do you have a different language for your parents than you do for your mates? Do you speak the language of lawyers? Of doctors? Of your hometown? Of your own particular tribe?
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And it is impossible to talk about multilingualism in the United States without acknowledging the politics of language and culture. We cannot forget that in the 1800s thousands of native American children were forced into schools that beat their languages out of them. In Texas and New Mexico, those states that were not long ago part of Mexico, students—up until the 1970s—were not allowed to speak Spanish at school. Sadly, none of this is ancient history. Just this year, Donald Trump chastised Jeb Bush for speaking Spanish and a broadcaster was attacked for pronouncing Spanish words a bit too correctly for the tastes of some of her English speaking listeners.
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Cicero, Saint Matthew and Erasmus were all literate in more than one language. Rumi, the 13th-century poet who has enjoyed such popularity lately, was born to Persian speaking parents in what is now Afghanistan. He wrote in Persian, with a smattering of Turkish, Greek and Arabic. To be educated then, as now, meant being able to write in an imperial language.
Ana Menéndez, lithub.com
