Culguage

I must have been in preschool the first time I tried to have a conversation with my mother in English. “No te entiendo” she said with a smile asking me to repeat myself in Spanish. My mother a university educated woman who had lived for years and had even studied in Toronto refused to speak to me in English for all of my early childhood. Curiosity, the driving force of every child, eventually brought me to ask her how she could understand all my friends and my teachers when they spoke to her in English but she couldn’t understand me. At that moment she looked me straight in the eye and said, “If you loose your language then you will loose your culture mi hija”

CULTURE? I had never heard that word before, knew what language was, but culture... ¿Qué? Quoi? What now?

“The years before 5 last the rest of their lives”

Funny that my very first encounter with the concept of culture, was associated with language. I went to French school because I am Quebecoise; I went into Hispanic Studies to perfect my Castellan while discovering my ancestors’ still proclaimed yet distant heyday. Now that I think about it, language for me has been one of the most defining aspects of culture.

Yet again, now miles and miles away from my mom’s Dominican kitchen in the middle of my multicultural metropolis, the moral of the story has come back with a vengeance.

Catalan anyone???!!!

Catalan is a beautiful language, one of the many spoken in Spain. Sounds kind of like Spanish ...mixed with French ... and Italian. Hear in Valencia and in Cataluña, Catalan stands for so much more than words. ITS CULTURE!!! It’s the subject of activism, a reason for independence, a marker of identity.

It was shocking that one of my first assignments was to translate from Catalan to Spanish and English and kind of crazy that one of the secretaries in the department, despite speaking perfect Spanish, has not spoken a word of Spanish to me since I got there. Yes... she only speaks to me in Catalan. “What if I don’t understand?” you may ask. Well.... then she repeats herself more slowly. LOL.

Did I sign on to learn another language? Not really. But I did sign on to learn another culture. HERE, language: its culture!!!