Lyrical Lingua Franca

I take for granted having grown up learning and speaking in English. As a language with a reputation for stealing the good bits from a bunch of other languages, there’s a part of it that could almost feel universal. And then, I hear a something that’s not entrenched in the realm of English as I’m familiar with it, and it feels like such a stupid thing to know. Especially when there are prettier and somehow more evocative languages.

Every year in elementary school, we would have a week or two with students from the high school who came to teach us German. It was always German, which was my secret frustration as a kid. For a long time, I think that was the only foreign language offered at my small K-12 school. At some point, Spanish entered the ring, and then I would live in hope that we’d get Spanish II students in our classroom for a couple of weeks, but it wasn’t ever to be. When it came time for me to pick a language in high school, I chose Spanish out of pure spite; I wanted nothing to do with German.

I think I also chose Spanish because on some level, I could see such clear lines between it and English. Our first day of class, the teacher did that immersion thing, where she spoke in Spanish the entire time. I’m not sure how the rest of the class felt about it, but for me personally, it was fascinating. I still think back to that first day of class sometimes, because it was probably the most fun I’d had with pure learning in a very long time. It was so easy to do high school by rote and memory, and for some reason it felt like that practice went out the window for the final hour of that first school day.

I didn’t have any more immersion in Spanish until I took a lone semester of it in college. In retrospect, I should have taken more of it, because there were days when I would be walking back to my dorm room and it was like my brain had jumped to a different track and my thoughts were in (admittedly jumbled and jerky) Spanish, and I enjoyed that feeling. I didn’t have that happen again until I went on an extended Duolingo jag; coupled with stumbling into a telenovela. There were some weird dreams in there, and I would wake up in the morning with the idea that my subconscious was doing a lot of work to internalize this other language… and all of the drama in the life of Ana Leal.

That accursed Duolingo owl entered my life a decade ago, and has routinely guilted me into maintaining our relationship ever since. Has it made me a better speaker? Absolutely not. In terms of reading, writing, hearing, and speaking Spanish, I would say I’m most proficient in reading and writing (with the assistance of Google’s multi-language keyboard). Listening is best accomplished with subtitles (because: reading), and I’m a reluctant speaker; I loath the awkwardness of being bad at something. Also, until pretty recently, the app was terrible at understanding anything I said in Spanish.

I tried using Duolingo to learn Portuguese, because “it’s a romance language, it’s not the same as Spanish, but it’s close, right?” That lasted maybe 3 days and I was so annoyed at all of the different branches the language took in sound and spelling that I gave it up. Before Duolingo, I had a brief flirtation with French, because I found an online friend who is French Canadian. We exchanged some mix tapes, and she sent me a CD full of music in French. I’ve never tried to get the owl to teach me French though, I’m not sure it would go well.

The closest I will ever come to learning a different romance language is Italian, since my first 6 years of piano lessons involved a lot of vocabulary lessons and identifying what the random italicized words mixed in with the notes meant. It’s very specialized, entirely sporadic, and basically not useful to my daily life until I decide I need to start sitting down at a piano everyday.

Instead, I’m making tentative steps to learn Irish (Gaeilge), because it just sounds interesting.

I’ve been thinking a lot about language lately. Some of that is down to Hozier’s new album, and the inclusion of Gaeilge in the lyrics of “De Selby (Part 1).” But, it’s clearly not the first time music has pulled me towards a language, or that listening to music with something other than English has been a more emotional or meaningful experience to me.

In the days when I listened to nothing but music podcasts (when I wasn’t listening to actual music), All Songs Considered turned me on to Sigur Rós. Before then, I think I had maybe listened to a handful of their songs, always the very ambient ones that played over random moments on TV shows. When the brass started at the beginning of “Inní mér syngur vitleysingur” I was taken aback, and then more thrown by how joyful it all felt. I tear up listening to the song, because it’s so intrinsically happy. I don’t know why happiness makes me cry, but that’s true of pretty much any intense emotion in my experience. To listen to something that sounds like distilled joy is going to bring it out in me, especially if I haven’t heard to it in a while. I know none of the lyrics to that song. I’m familiar with all of the vocalizations, because I’ve listened to it for 15 years, but I couldn’t tell you what any of it means. Sometimes, I wonder if what I’m hearing and identifying as words is correct. But, I also know that this group plays with their lyrics, and some of it is actual Icelandic, and other parts are… something else. I remembered it being referred to as Hopelandic, I guess in Icelandic it’s known as Vonlenska.

I can’t say which language in music will hit my guts and which one won’t. So much of it comes down to my mood I suppose. It doesn’t all have to make me cry for me to want to listen to it again, because I certainly had fun overplaying “Dragostea Din Tei” in its heyday on the internet.

But, not every piece of music featuring a foreign language will strike some hidden chord inside me and turn my brain into a sponge for the language. It would be nice if it resulted in me being multilingual, but mostly my memory contains snippets of lyrics I may or may not be able to translate. If it’s in Spanish (and I’ve listened to it enough times) I can probably figure out the words, anything else… maybe I listened to it on repeat and ran the lyrics through a translator enough times that I memorized it?

This post has gotten away from me… it sat in my drafts folder for a week, precipitated by listening to “De Selby (Part 1)” and then marinating in the back of my brain while life went on. There are so many languages I want to know, but can’t find the right avenue to learn them. I live in Northern Minnesota, where an effort is being made to include the Ojibwe language throughout our community, and the only avenues I find to learn are the content creators who take the time to share it. It seems fanciful to think that learning to understand those words might give me a greater appreciation of where I live, but I look at how much appreciation I get from other things where I’ve been able to see the influence of the language, and maybe it’s not that much of a stretch.