The Accidental Polyglot

What do you call a person who can speak two languages? Bilingual. Three languages? Trilingual. How about one language? Not monolingual, just American. As English speakers and inhabitants of the only superpower left, Americans are spoiled when it comes to learning and speaking other languages. A pity, given America's past and ongoing history as a country of immigrants. Instead of seeing the wave of immigrants as an opportunity to learn a different language, many Americans blame them for not learning English fast enough and speaking it properly. When traveling, say, in Europe, Americans complain that the French people do not want to speak English even though they know how. Another lost opportunity.

There's no better time to start learning another language than when you're very young. When I was growing up in East Java, I heard at least five languages spoken at the same time. I lived in my paternal grandparents' home in downtown Surabaya. My grandpa and grandma knew only the Hokchia language -- a close relative of the Fuzhou language in northern Fujian, China – and spoke it exclusively with my father and his nine brothers and sisters. They sent my father and his siblings to Chinese schools post World War II; consequently they spoke Mandarin with each other, with a heavy dose of low Javanese and the bazaar Malay commonly spoken among the ethnic Chinese community in Java. By the time my siblings and I entered school in the 70s, the Suharto regime had closed all Chinese schools, banned the usage of Chinese language in public, and constrained the celebration of Chinese festivals to private homes. As a result, my generation went to Indonesian schools and speak mainly Bahasa Indonesia. And so it was. We spoke bazaar Malay with the brothers and sisters; proper Bahasa Indonesia with the teachers and civil servants; Javanese with school friends, the housekeepers; and bazaar Malay with a smattering of Mandarin with our parents, aunties and uncles. With the grandparents, we spoke the little Hokchia that we knew and sign language.

My father and mother have nine brothers and sisters each, and we had to properly call the aunties and uncles in the Hokchia language. In Chinese culture, paternal aunties and uncles are called differently from the maternal aunties and uncles. The husband of your father's elder sister is not just uncle, he is "father's sister's husband". The wives of your father's brothers have ranks: father's big brother's wife, father's 2^nd brother's wife, father's third brother's wife, and so on.

It's amazing that the past four generations of my family have each been speaking a different main language. My grandparents spoke only Hokchia throughout their lives, my parents mainly speak Mandarin (although they also speak Hokchia and Indonesian), my generation speaks mainly Indonesian, and my children speak mainly English. Speaking a different language is a way to understand another culture, and it is probably one of the greatest gifts that parents can give to their children.