{"id":310,"date":"2015-03-08T09:37:15","date_gmt":"2015-03-08T09:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hilarymoriarty.com\/blog\/?p=310"},"modified":"2015-03-08T09:37:15","modified_gmt":"2015-03-08T09:37:15","slug":"the-gift-of-tongues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/?p=310","title":{"rendered":"The gift of tongues"},"content":{"rendered":"

Learning to speak another language may be hard, but it has long-lasting benefits.
\n
\nIt\u2019s not often a sign in a supermarket car park stops you in your tracks. But, newly moved back to Wales, I paused recently when confronted with a sign which identified where you could collect goods previously ordered on line. The word which arrested me was \u2018clicio\u2019, as close as the Welsh language currently gets to defining how you do business online. It made me smile, and I thought it was wonderful. Here is an example of an ancient language accommodating the 21st century and its jargon, as it must if it is to stay viable through these years of national distinctions dissolving, and sustain its very existence for the next generation and the one after that. Languages have always adapted to modern times \u2013 hence the boom in pedantry in English, with purists grumbling about the misuse of \u2018infer\u2019 and \u2018deduce\u2019 and \u2018hopefully\u2019, for instance.
\nSo \u2018clicio\u2019 is linguistic progress. But it was a bit of a surprise, in a Welsh language TV soap opera, to hear a character rattle away in Welsh, then suddenly end her sentence with an emphatic pronunciation of two words: \u201cbig time\u201d. She didn\u2019t quite use the air gesture for inverted commas, but she came pretty close. But why use the English words at all, when Welsh certainly has simple equivalents? Later she described her partner, as she apparently hauled him by his tie into the bedroom, as \u201ccute\u201d \u2013 and again, I\u2019m stopped in my tracks. Can Welsh really not accommodate such a nuanced notion as \u2018cute\u2019. (Pause for audience participation \u2013 go on then, tell me what it would be in French or German, because \u2018cute\u2019 is not quite as simple as \u2018good looking\u2019 or \u2018handsome\u2019, is it?)
\nI grew up in the years when the English (as the event was perceived by the Welsh) evacuated and drowned a Welsh valley to provide a reservoir and water for Liverpool. The small, Welsh-speaking village of Capel Celyn was at the heart of the valley. Google the name \u2013 it\u2019s a heartbreaking story. The event shocked and scarred the Welsh psyche and hardened and crystallised nascent Welsh nationalism. In some ways, today\u2019s Wales \u2013 with its own government, free prescriptions for all, culture and media dominated by Welsh speakers and Welsh lessons compulsory in every primary school \u2013 is a product of those days and an event which proved a unifying force. Part of the new nationalism was the realisation of the importance of the language as a source of identity. If you did not use it, you would likely lose it.
\nThe late 20th century saw the fight back, to the point where completely monoglot English families saw the academic advantages of the Welsh-medium secondary schools and the improved career prospects for Welsh speakers, and committed their own children to Welsh-medium schools, intending them to become bilingual, as surely as they would if they had been brought up in France.
\nMy parents arrived in North Wales before the Anglicisation of Wales, spearheaded by television, had really started. Few people in the village spoke English at all, and then under duress. Speaking Welsh was a great excluder, useful if you neither knew nor trusted the incomer. The grammar school I duly attended, in a town four miles away, divided its first year into two classes, not by ability but by language \u2013 1E was taught in English, 1W received every subject through the medium of Welsh. Most staff were bilingual.
\nSo at 11, I arrived into a curriculum which included Latin, French and Welsh, no options. And my parents muttered that learning Welsh was a waste of time.
\nNot being fortune tellers, they were wrong: it would have changed my life if I had bothered to become fluent in Welsh. It would have opened the door to Welsh broadcasting and I might never have gone near a classroom at all.
\nIt\u2019s a pity we cannot reach out to today\u2019s students and convince them that learning a language could change their lives. When Estelle Morris dismantled the old prescription that everyone should study a foreign language up to GCSE, it was a bit like a parent abandoning bedtime. Children don\u2019t enjoy going to bed early, but parents make them do it because it\u2019s good for them. We know it, children don\u2019t, but we do it anyway \u2013 tough, Junior, live with it.
\nLearning a new language anywhere other than in the cradle or possibly while working in a bar is hard work. You have a head full of sophisticated thoughts and sentence constructions with dangling adverbial clauses, and now your vocabulary is limited and alien grammatical constructions are bewildering. I know \u2013 I survived (I choose the verb advisedly) two terms of Russian evening classes and emerged able to do little more than say \u201cplease\u201d and \u201cthank you\u201d and \u2013 weirdly \u2013 \u201cI have lost my passport but I am not a spy.\u201d
\nLessons were a salutary reminder of how it felt to be not the smarty-pants teacher, but a learner again \u2013 handicapped by ignorance, arrogance and fear of looking stupid in equal measure.
\nEvery lesson was terrifying. Why didn\u2019t I do the homework? Will she ask me next? Does everyone else know the answer? Most often and most cripplingly, \u201cAm I going to look stupid?\u201d Next to two Polish students? Absolutely.
\nMultiply my agonised, competitive, reluctant, time-pressed and therefore \u201cIt\u2019s not my fault!\u201d attitude by the simple fact of being a teenager, and you have a recipe for drop-out followed by a teacher response of \u201cGood riddance!\u201d When we should be saying, \u201cStop with the attitude and get back in here \u2013 it\u2019s like bedtime, you hate it, but it\u2019s good for you. A new language is hard, but you will be glad of it one day \u2013 like having good teeth if you keep brushing them. Get over it.\u201d The secretary of state for education should have said just that. And praise the Lord that Gove did.
\nBut even so, we are left with a lingering arrogance which says, \u201cWhy should I? Everyone talks English \u2013 it\u2019s the one language that binds us all. Big global business uses English because for everyone else it\u2019s a given second language \u2013 from the cradle, from kindergarten, in the media, in films and videos \u2013 English, flooding the world. Lucky me! Born a native speaker Ha!\u201d\u2019
\nAre we at the tail end of this dominance? Is Chinese the universal language to come? Like my parents, I might say, \u201cNah \u2013 have you seen it? Or the problems you will have with pronouncing a word meaning four different things, depending on your inflection?\u201d \u2018Inflection\u2019 for goodness sake? Chinese orals would be a nightmare. How familiar is British youth with the very idea of inflection? Chinese? It will never catch on.
\nBut my parents, in a tiny village in North Wales, before TV really brought English to the hills and valleys, and they started to feel at home even if they never spoke the language, were wrong. And I may be equally wrong about Chinese. And I do know that if I were 18 again, I would rather face my future in this amazing world with two languages at my disposal than just one.
\nAnd I would be smug in both.
\nThis article first appeared in Independent Education Today at http:\/\/ie-today.co.uk\/Article\/the-gift-of-tongues <\/a>on 1 March 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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