On growing up bilingual

When I was born, my Italian-Argentinian father phoned my Irish mother’s parents from the Rotunda to tell them the news. “It is a woman” replied my dad.

He didn’t speak much English, and as he only stayed in Ireland for my first few years of my life, he never improved beyond clumsy, funny sounding phrases.

But when he spoke to me it was always in his first language, in Spanish, and he insisted I learnt to speak it back to him.

Then it was my turn to sound clumsy. I made obvious mistakes, like “la agua” when it’s meant to be “el agua”. I didn’t understand that articles were in any way important, because I came to them as translation from English. You didn’t need to memorise “THE water” so why “el agua”?

It took me a very long time to figure out that languages are more than just translating one word to another. There’s a whole different frame and way of thinking in words, in another language.

I lacked words for my level of fluency- if my dad hadn’t talked to me about something yet, it wasn’t in my vocabulary. Over the years I got better, but when I reached adulthood I still spoke a very innocent Spanish. (It took me some time living in Argentina on my own to figure out things like, in English, we come, in Spanish, they go).

As a child, I was embarrassed by my Spanish. It was just one more way to be 'weird'. I was already the daughter of a foreign person, who wasn’t even married to my mother… or divorced, either.

They had just been in a relationship for a few years. I also didn’t believe in God. My family didn’t go to Mass.

My grandparents were from the North and attended a church where there was a lot of singing or perhaps less singing. I wasn’t sure, I had no reference.

My parents drank coffee, not tea. My mum and stepdad shared the cooking and cleaning.

None of these things were bad, but they were, to many, weird, and in the 1990s other children didn’t respond with politically-correct acceptance. If they were nice, they were still very openly curious.

Later, people seemed jealous of my languages, and asked me to teach them words and phrases. But when I was little, it just made me embarrassed.

I improved quickly when I had a long period with my dad.

I would visit him while on my school holidays or he’d come to Ireland when he could leave his business, then he’d go back home to Italy, and we spoke on the phone but my Spanish would fade.

It must have been frustrating for him, to see me slowly improve my ability to communicate with him only to lose it again every year.

When I was 20, I moved to Italy, to the city my dad lives in, and lived there for a few years. My Spanish (and Italian, of course) got better from constant use with my dad and his family. It doesn’t really go stale any more, it stays fluent.

And it’s something I treasure, not just because I can talk to my dad, but because his daughters, my sisters, speak Spanish, Italian, and English, and although our abilities in these are inverted, we have the same language pool.

We can make jokes that only work if you speak Spanish and Italian. We can visit each other and keep our independence, I can sit with my sisters and watch the Italian version of Take Me Out (which might not seem exciting but they have a version with just over sixty-year-olds, and it is AMAZING).

They can come visit me and meet my friends, and be independent, and avoid the leprechaun traps.

We can share books! I recently sent my 12-year-old sister a book I loved when I was her age, the Snow Spider, set in Wales, and not available in Italian. I hope she likes it.

Sharing a language with my dad, his wife and my sisters is precious.

But, not everyone believes the result is worth the confusion or persevering through a child’s embarrassment.

I met South American immigrants in Italy who, treated roughly by Italian bureaucrats (a scourge barely tolerable to Italians, a nightmare to anyone with a slightly different background) had opted to speak passable Italian to their babies as opposed to their own native Spanish.

Whoever told those mothers their children would be “confused” by two languages, or perform badly in Italian class because of the Spanish dragging them down, should be flogged in the nearest plaza.

It’s advice many immigrants are given, and it can be hugely damaging. As an adult, that mother is never going to be as good in Italian as her child could have been in Spanish.

There’s a little communication wall between them, something getting in the way of the parent’s authority, who should at least appear to know more and know best until the child is some way grown up… Never mind that child going back to the family home to meet cousins and great aunts or discover their heritage.

It’s advice some ignorant teachers gave my dad’s wife, a language teacher who knew it was rubbish and ignored it. At some stage in my sisters’ education, a dip in Italian grades was attributed to confusion with multiple languages. Stupid and bizarre, as a year later the child would be adding English to their class list anyway.

My own battle was against perfectionists and proud Spaniards. My dad paid for me to study Spanish multiple times- each teacher I found was dropped when I fell out with them.

Yes, I was extremely headstrong, but the issue was always the same- I spoke Spanish like an Argentinian. I said “vos” instead of “tu” and “manejar” instead of “conducir”. The word “coger” didn’t mean pick up or take, it meant something bold, and made me laugh.

But my Spanish teachers would correct me, to teach me the Spanish way, which they considered the correct way. But that’s as outdated as forcing the queen’s English- it’s not the only right way.

I fell out with teacher after teacher and never learnt grammar formally. My final attempt was sixth year, when my teacher was extremely petty with me and made fun of my Argentinian words.

I left her class to sit my exams independently, and she berated me and said I’d never pass the leaving cert on my own. I got an A1, no thanks to my teacher.

I was taught languages in school which just didn’t take, like Irish.

I was top of my class in Irish as a child, all the way up to secondary school, and I barely have a focal today.

Similarly, I had honours Leaving Cert French and was spat out of secondary school unable to talk about anything more than my parents’ jobs and my house with two floors and a little garden.

What I learnt from growing up with exposure to five languages, and becoming fluent in three- is that you really need to need to use the language for it to stick. Some of what I learnt in French lay buried at the back, but when I moved there for the guts of a year, vocabulary from school would resurface.

It wasn’t all wasted time, but it wasn’t there for me to access until I jumped in the deep end, and spent some time squirming, unable to communicate, like a big baby, but with a sense of shame.

My Irish, sadly, was never called upon outside of school but languages each have their beauty, and Irish has lent its own to the English the world speaks today.

There are things that happen in your brain when you learn multiple languages. There are plenty of articles on it- I’ve gobbled up the ones that say I’m smarter or more empathetic for every additional dictionary. Delicious.

But mainly, it’s just an opportunity for learning that there’s more than one way to say or do something.

Learning aged 18 in your first house-share that your family’s way of making potatoes, or scrambled eggs isn’t the only way- and maybe years later, admitting it’s not even the best way, is part of the journey towards being a nice human to be around.

Extend it to something more important, and there’s sexuality, religion, identity, mental health, disability, all kinds of things where people can be more tolerant or less tolerant.

There’s so much tied up in language - how we express ourselves, how others perceive us. I suspect some stereotypes come from how we use words to say the same things.

I lived in France for a while and never found the French to be stuck up or impatient, and I never found the Italians to be more passionate, or the Spanish to be arrogant, but their ways of talking or gesturing or referring to things might seem to fit with how English speakers express impatience, or passion, or so on.

These things maybe feed the stereotypes people are so fond of. But I don’t like stereotypes.

They’re just another way of dividing people, saying what’s normal. And the bilingual, non-religious, non-tea-drinker, with the foreign dad would prefer if people looked outside those boxes, at the many different ways there are of doing things, of living, and of saying what you want to say.

Do you have a story to tell about bilingualism or learning another language? If so, please send it to studenthub@irishtimes.com