I spied my father's doppleganger. Serge greeted me with a huge smile, so different from the "who-is-this-crazy-lady" when I first approached him a couple of years ago to say he looked exactly like my father. A week or so later when I showed him my dad's photo, he saw the resemblance. His 95+ year old mother agreed. I'm now greeted with an even bigger smile from her.
This time, Serge was with his children and grandchildren. His mother, now in a wheel chair, was proud to add an introduction to her great grandchildren. She is a Catalan survivor of the 1939 January diaspora when the village went from 3,000 people to over 100,000 in a few days with those fleeing Franco over the freezing Pyrenees. I would love to talk to her about her experiences, but fear bringing up memories of the beach concentration camp.
"We can speak English," Serge's son tells me and we fall into a discussion of language in general but stay in French. He wants his children to be bilingual. His little preschool girl already is.
So many of my friends want/need their children to be bilingual starting from the cradle. A music student and her waiter husband are speaking French and English to their new baby and working with her eight-year old daughter, who has a fascination with Wednesday Addams.
Another French friend's four-year old sidled up to me announcing, "I speak English very good."
A teenager, whom I've known since before she could walk, has developed her English to the fluent stage. Her mother, although French, speaks English so well I forget she's not an Anglophone. The mother speaks Spanish, also.
A former colleague in Switzerland was born of a German mother but raised by an American Army doctor living all over the world. She is married to a Swiss Italian. She has raised a child who switches from German, Swiss German, English and French easily.
I'll admit, I burst with pride when my daughter visits my French village and a German mother-tongue friend and she start rattling off in German. She learned it through five years of study at Boston Latin, which also required five-years of Latin and doing most of her university studies in Mannheim, Germany, saving us several fortunes in university tuition. She found two jobs in Boston because she was bilingual. She is now working on her Swedish, but she'll need to improve her French to live here in retirement.
In Geneva speaking one language is almost a handicap when it comes to employment and a social life. Want ads list languages required. The canton is full of Third Culture Kids, a term used to describe children who spend most of their childhood and adolescence in a culture different from their parents. They are not totally a part of either.
I think of myself as a Third Culture Adult. I will always be most comfortable in English, but I've worked and lived with Francophones so long I can forget which language I'm in.
I'm sorry I never spent enough time with my French-Canadian grandparents to learn it when my brain was more receptive. Different studies disagree what is the best age to learn a second tongue, but forty-eight was late to learn French and my then boss said I never would. He admitted he was wrong.
Marrying an American-raised man has thrust me back into English, which is what I write in. Not his fault that I will pick up an English book before a French one.
Forty-eight was late to start developing a second language, although I had muddled through French at uni, mostly thanks to a bilingual friend. My poor husband started in his sixties. He needed to pass language tests for first his living permit and later citizenship. Despite a hearing problem which required an exemption, he has done remarkably well.
Like Geneva, Argelès has conclaves of other languages with French, Spanish and Catalan dominating: English, Danish, German, Swedish, Arabic. Often when meeting new people, the first thing I need to do is to establish the language we will speak.
Hearing English is no guarantee of understanding bilingual or not. Leaving a movie made in Glasgow, a woman said in French she thought she thought she knew English but she needed subtitles. She said she felt better after I confessed as an English mother-tongue person, I needed subtitles too. Sometimes I still need to translate my Bostonian for my husband.
I shudder when I here an American say "Speak English you're in America." Although I've never seen any study, having more than one language stretches your brain into greater understanding. As a person who has fought for over 35 years with a second language, it has also made me humble.
Our dog, Sherlock, is bilingual. He can disobey in French and English, although he knows vien-come, C'est assez-that's enough, bas-down, glace-ice cream and much more. We've taken to spelling. In any case he's a Chien gâté, spoiled dog in any language.
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