If you are in any way enthusiastic about languages, then living in one of the many frequently monolingual countries of Europe you can encounter gasps of astonishment at having ventured into such unknown territory and twisted your tongue into all manner of strange positions your native language simply does not tolerate. People can be quite frightened by it. The truth is, we should really be crying out in our ‘monolingual’ nations for the multilingualism of which we have been deprived. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any reliable statistics but the extent of bilingualism and multilingualism in the world far outstrips the picture given by the many governments who only give official recognition to a small number of their country’s languages. There is probably no truly monolingual country in the world; as David Crystal notes in his Encyclopedia of Language, in many African countries such as Ghana and Nigeria there may be only one official language, but up to 90% of the population may be bi- or multilingual (p.360).

So strange as it may seem, speaking other languages is not all that odd. In fact, for many people ‘other’ languages are ‘their’ languages and not parcelled away in some distant land. Of course, anyone claiming to be monolingual is actually lying. We’ve all heard our mother’s telephone voice. And used one of our own. Then there’s that accent you put on when you meet your relatives from up North or friends from down South and the gobble-de-gook you’ve learnt to get by in your job. And then people have to learn your language – what is that nervous tick that makes you insist on calling tomatoes, mushrooms?

Still, all that putting on voices for different people in your mother-tongue, doesn’t seem to be quite the same as speaking French or German or Spanish, for all we have begged borrowed and stolen words of these languages over the centuries. (Oh, how I wish we had stolen ‘pamplemousse’ [grapefruit] from French!) There are people out there, who simply consume languages like custard creams, or pints of stout, or whatever your favourite comestible. They read them, write about them and there are marvellous statistics on the most languages ever spoken by an individual. This discussion post from the linguist list provides a few fascinating examples. Languages are fascinating pieces of machinery and offer ample food for those who are audio-visually inclined. Posting up the link to John Wells’s blog today, I felt again a sheer delight in pure sounds and their satisfying (yet artificial) IPA transcriptions. I had thought that here I might attempt some grand comparison between languages and a great nation in the manner of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) but I’ve yet to read that in full, so I’ll bite my tongue. Let me just add a bit of hyperbole to  a few hackneyed analogies from the many narratives about language learning I’ve read – they are societies unto themselves where the unusual sounds are your operatic arias and brass bands, the words are your colleagues, friends and lovers, and the grammar is a joyful game of chess. There is a structure and beautiful, comforting mathematics to it all, albeit a bit of a rebellious chaotic one. There is a liberating truculence to some aspects of language which simply cannot be reasoned with. Why is it ‘mice’ and not ‘mouses’ when it’s ‘houses’ and not ‘hice’?

Just is, so there.

Well….just is when you look at language as a structure all on its own, but that’s the problem. Language is designed for communication and the pure delight of language must at some point be brought up short before the reality of its speakers. They are the ones who decide which things they are too lazy or forgetful to say and make all those irregular verbs regular. And there are more serious considerations. Lost in the wonder of words for their own sake you can forget what they mean. Looking back now, my grandmother’s reaction to me learning German was probably quite mild, given its associations for her with a nation which had threatened her home in Liverpool with air raids for several years while she raised her young son alone, when her husband went off to war. Times change. Others cannot so easily forget the horrendous connections between words and the human deeds that go with them. Jakov Lind, who migrated to London after the holocaust finds himself desperate to rid himself of a language which had been used to ‘yell and scream at people with venom and hatred, with threats and murderous slogans, since it became a language of decrees and curfews, inhuman laws and black-framed announcements, a language of lies and falsehood, of murder and death.’(Numbers, 1973,  pp.75-6)

In his own autobiography, The Tongue Set Free (1977), Elias Canetti recalls his own fascination with languages: he spoke the Sephardic Jewish language Ladino, Bulgarian, French, English and German. In one particularly memorable passage, he notices that people in a village he is passing through sound as if they are speaking Old High German and his mother berates him severely for his blindness to the circumstances in which the words are spoken: ‘You came back from your excursion and spoke about Old High German for days on end. Old High German! Today! They may not even have enough to eat, but why should you care!’ (p.315).

Canetti went on to write many novels, plays and other texts including a study of ‘Crowds and Power’ (1960).  He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Perhaps language was his country, but he let its wonders speak of and to………..the world.