The Multilingual Thing - Why Does It Even Matter?

Who hasn’t been shaking their head, on occasions, over people waxing lyrical about the most pointless of pastimes? But then, who's to decide whether something is worth getting excited about or whether it's a total waste of time? 

In the end, I would argue, it's all down to your chosen perspective.

You could look at it like this: In another four billion years or so, the sun will run out of fuel, it will explode and wipe out our solar system. And since we can barely get off this rock - and certainly not far enough away from it to reach and wreck some other beautiful planet - we’ll be done for. In the face of this inevitable event, what does anything matter? Football, saving humpback whales, getting junior to eat his broccoli, fashion, music, gardening, knitting sock puppets, building a log cabin in the woods with your bare hands – it's all equally pointless in the (very) long run, why invest effort and energy in anything if it will all end up burnt to a crisp?

Actually, I find the thought that we're all just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic strangely comforting. Even at the risk of fucking up royally, you might as well try to cultivate yourself a nice little obsession, since, ultimately, you’ve got no more and no less to lose than anyone else. 

My personal take is that what matters most, while we’re all hurtling towards our chargrilled finale, is what gets us fired up as individuals. The scope ranges from pleasing solely oneself to enriching the lives of others. Maybe we should aim for a bit of both?

We all find different things rewarding, it’s as simple as that, and it’s more about how we cultivate our interests, rather than what they are. If what's keeping us back is the fear that the choices and sacrifices we make in pursuit of our foibles will seem ridiculous to others, then we wind up in a lose-lose situation: we won't be able to pull off the causes others deem "worthy" for lack of emotional impetus and commitment, and neither will we succeed at what we actually do care about if we keep our hooves glued to the starting blocks.

When, about three years ago, I mentioned to a group of acquaintances that I was going to start learning Portuguese, one of them said, "Oh, yet another language you won't ever need." ¡Caramba! What the hell does this person know about what I need or what may or may not be useful to me? 

We don’t choose our passions. We find them – or, as some airy fairy tree-hugging folk would argue, they find us – and they ignite us, often for unfathomable reasons. They can crack open doors that would otherwise have remained firmly closed to us. If we are passionate about something, it makes us feel connected – to our own selves, to other people, to the world around us – and without that connectedness, we cannot function effectively as human beings. 

So, I thought, what could be a better place for doing verbal cartwheels around one of my most enduring passions than a brand new blog? 

I want this blog to help me reflect on my (at times a bit chaotic and unstructured) multilingual life, turning it into a more conscious and productive experience. I want to go on improving my skills and better integrate my thus far rather poorly developed, peripheral languages, Portuguese and French, more tightly into my everyday life. I also want to record some of those curious language-related daily incidents and insights before they evaporate into thin air. Maybe, I'm hoping, these will resonate with someone else out there…?

That brings me to the other main point of this blog: connecting with people for whom language is not a mere technical tool located in the arid, strategising parts of their brains, deployed on a strict communicate-or-starve basis. For some people, and I count myself among them, languages go so much deeper, they are an integral part of who we are and by merging with new ones, our consciousness expands, we encounter parts of ourselves we never knew existed, and this makes us grow, evolve and change. It is this emotionally-centred, experiential dimension of multilingualism that is to be the heart of this blog.

A New Language Blog And Not By Accident

I was reluctant to start this blog. Wasn’t it, perhaps, just a bit too ‘special interest’? Too nerdy? Head-too-far-up-my-own-arse…?

I’d been ruminating over starting a dedicated language blog for the past couple of years, but couldn’t decide on which angle to take with it. Then, a few months ago, the idea of keeping it focused on everyday life (meaning my life in particular) lodged itself into my head.

I mean, there are already plenty of useful blogs out there focusing on learning techniques, language app evaluations, the ins and outs of bilingual parenting, not forgetting the ubiquitous “my placement year abroad” authored by sprightly twenty-nothings who refer to the heads of their host families as "Mum" and "Dad". All well and good, I peruse all types of language blogs, but maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't hurt to toss another one into to the mix, one that was about life as suffered experienced by the middle-aged, slightly grumpy contingent of language enthusiasts whose memory is starting to conk out on them? A blogger friend suggested the title "MyMidlifeLanguageCrisis", but that would have cut, quite possibly, a bit too close close to the bone... ahem.

Amusing as well as exasperating situations arise when, instead of chugging along on a monolingual rail tied to one country and one culture, one’s life runs on multiple tracks. Keeping all those plates spinning can be exhausting, but it's uniquely rewarding at the same time.

Since early June, I've been keeping a “Language diary”. The key objective, besides gathering source material for the blog, was to record and reflect upon when, how and why I was using my languages throughout the day. This is when I realised a couple of things.

First of all, it struck me that most of what I wrote down was utterly banal. Some serious doubts manifested themselves at that point - who wants to read “answered an email in English”, “asked the butcher in Spanish to cut some chicken breasts into strips”, “skyped with my Mum in German”? I would have to figure out a way of making it more engaging somehow, but without losing the day-to-dayness of it. Hmmm.

Second, I found that keeping a precise log detailing every single activity and the language used to be an impossible task. There was just too much switching back and forth. I might be reading work-related material in English for twenty minutes, quickly respond to a friend’s message in Spanish, followed by looking up an unknown French word in a Facebook post, then go back to my work until skype bleats at me, and so on.

On the other hand, this exercise underscored the validity of my premise – that my life was indeed multilingual, and inextricably so. It wasn’t a case of spending all day in one language and then consciously having to create a time slot to listen to a French podcast or read a newspaper article in Portuguese (although my day is punctuated by these kinds of activities, too). It showed me that I had already succeeded in what I set out to do half a decade ago when I decided to move to Spain, and that recognition was a satisfying one.

That’s right: none of this happened by accident. I did not just fall into a multilingual existence. Like most people I know, I grew up in a monolingual environment, and I could have chosen, quite easily, to remain there.

I felt drawn to languages since my first contact with English at school, when I was about eleven years old. I don't know why. I decided to follow it, I made choices which led me towards multilingualism, often in roundabout ways, while also trying to do a bunch of other things, since life is never a linear route from A to point B.

Often, my pursuit of languages, or "polyglottery", as a friend calls it, had to go on the back burner for a while, sometimes for years, but it's on the back burner no more. The raison d’être of this blog is to keep tending to it right at the centre of my stove.

Why does it matter, anyway? That will be the topic of the next post…