Owning a foreign language

The scene in My Fair Lady is fairly well known where Henry Higgins, Professor of phonetics, undertakes to teach Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney-speaking flower-seller, upper-class English. After weeks of teaching, he decides she is ready to be ‘presented’ as a ‘lady’, and wagers that no one will recognise her Cockney origins. To shake this hope, Zoltan Kaparthy, a Hungarian, asks her to dance with him and declares that he has identified her accent—not only is she Hungarian but of royal blood. ‘She is a princess.’ 

The fact is that while some of us struggle with new languages, others acquire them, by meticulous hard work and attentive listening, and speak faultlessly.

We use ‘foreign’ words with all their associations in unique ways. In the Tamil film Enga Veetu Mahalakshmi, the scene is a village with, on the face of it, contentment and self-sufficiency. There is a dance sequence, ‘pattanamdam pogalama dee pombale, panam-kaas tedalaama dee (let’s move to the city, dear, in search of [more] money). The man clearly wants to migrate to the city where he believes there is a new world bursting with opportunities. His wife beseeches him not to, across the song. She says:

“Town pakkam pogadeenguh, mapille / Town aagi po-id-vinguh…” (Don’t go to the town, mapille, You will become the town.)

Here is for me a thrilling example of how the loan-word ‘town’ is used in a Tamil song. The Tamil-speaking audience knows, needs no paraphrase that
‘Town’ signifies evil, dishonesty, unknown dangers. 

There is no doubt that to be fully resident in a new language, one must work at the task in multiple, perhaps unusual, ways. My British friend, scholar, writer, the late Alan Duff learnt Slovenian by reading the newspaper from end to end every day. He had a basic dictionary but that was all. At all other times, he listened intently to Slovenian friends and colleagues speak. I heard that years later, he stopped reading newspapers in English. ‘This is easier,’ he said.

So how do people adopt and take ownership of a ‘foreign language’? Jhumpa Lahiri immersed herself in Italian, and much of her writing is first in Italian and later translated to English. My friend Suguna’s father learnt Pashto as a result of living in the Northwest for years. After retirement, he learnt Arabic late-night hours on a Radio Turkey service, and Italian at the embassy in Jorbagh — never mind, she says, that all these languages were with a faint Tamil accent that never left him! 

And then we have Caliban in the Tempest using his just-learned language—by his own admission learnt in order to curse—speaking with great beauty. Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

Lisa Doolittle, the singers in the Tamil film, Alan Duff, Caliban and Suguna’s father are examples of people gripped and pushed forward by the other language. You move to the town and become the town.