Native Tongues

The Hawaiian language has a sacred ring to it. There’s a dignity and resonance, maybe from all those vowels, that makes it sound prayerful. When I look up a word in the Hawaiian dictionary, I often find that the same word can have opposing meanings. Like “bad” nowadays can mean “good” when a kid says it, I suppose. It reminds me of the joke about the thermos. When you put the hot things in there hot, they come out hot. When you put the cold things in there cold, they come out cold. How does it know?

Nonverbal language is by far the easiest for all of us to learn. I’ve read statistics that range from 82% to 95% of our entire spoken message as carried by body language. That’s probably how you know what meaning to take from a word in Hawaiian: by how the person’s body says it. That’s probably also how you know when someone is lying to you in any language, whether you want to believe it yourself or not.

I know enough of several languages to get myself in a pickle just about anywhere. I have a knack for languages, but I forget to learn anything really useful. I know how to say key in German, muscles in Ndebele, tired in French, ocean in Hawaiian (and the state fish), handsome in Italian, snake in Shona, blue sky in Spanish, yes in Japanese, and no in Russian. Never once in my travels did I pause to learn the word for bathroom. But you can be sure that I found them. Now there’s a statistic for you about body language. When my sister asked for directions to eat a toilet in Austria, her body language helped her snickering listener to direct her to find a toilet.
In Mexico, I sat down to a nice breakfast and was just finishing my cuppa when my waiter asked me, in Spanish, to stand up. I understood the gestures, and stood, while a diminutive man from the ranks came and stood beside me. All the men working there started to giggle, exchanging jokes in Spanish, looking at our extremes in height as the world’s funniest contrast. I smiled and laughed, hoping that the jests were not about him being weaned, and understanding the process if not the content. I felt a little sorry for the short guy, but then I guessed he was feeling a length of sorry for the tall gal. Somehow in the body language we both knew that we don’t take it too seriously. So, we laughed.

My German is halting and I have to search for the right word. I make up weird sentences to use my limited vocabulary and still express an idea. I’m sunk if someone uses a word that’s new to me. But this is not the case for the truly bilingual. They flow between languages as if it were a natural thing to do. Which, in their lives, it is. It makes them look very clever, in my opinion, and I yearn to know another language thoroughly. But if English is the most global, how do you pick which one to make a second?

Waikiki is a great place to watch people flow easily and rapidly between languages. The hotel desk clerks give the same directions in English or Japanese throughout the day. I watch from a distance the hand movements. I could be a Russian and still go where directed. I wouldn’t know why I was going there, or what to look for, but I could get there. These fluidly bilingual folks amaze me.

Any small child who speaks a language that’s foreign to me sounds like a genius. No matter how I go through the logic, my language seems like it’s the easy one, but that kid has learned a whole other language. How do they know? The learning window for languages to be truly natural to a child are in the early years, around age two. Barring that exposure to a second language, most of us have to learn it in school. I’m glad that our children are learning Hawaiian in the schools. It’s a smart thing to do, as well as a brush with the sacred.