I had a conversation in Sierra Leone with someone who speaks an enviable number of languages. I grew up in West Virginia, where it’s not uncommon for high school French teachers not to have been to France, ever (one of mine had, and one, as I recall, hadn’t). People who can move thoughtlessly between three or four tongues make me quiver with jealousy.
Enviable as that may be, he said, you also lose something about a language when you’re able to speak it, and something you can never have at all with your native tongue. “I can’t tell you how Arabic sounds,” he said. “To me, it just sounds like how people should speak.”
I love this idea, this certainty about one’s first language. And I love that I may be able to hear a melody in his Arabic that he can’t hear, or that I can find a bit of poetry that’s lost on the speakers of Portuguese chattering at the cafes in Guinea Bissau — or even, dare I say it, in Dutch?
But now I’m sitting at a hotel cafe in Kigali. There’s a German couple chatting to my left. They’re speaking a bit too quietly for me to get every word, and I don’t understand every word I get, but I have that sense of comfort and relief that floods your body when you sit down after an hours-long walk, or with the first sip of a cold beer on a very hot day. (Or, as I learned on a hike with friends in the hills of the Sächsische Schweiz, when, if you’re German, you combine them.)
It’s almost like that now in Kinyarwanda, where my vocabulary is more limited and so the words I know pop out, like the accented notes in a Hindemith counterpoint, and I can use them to anchor myself in the melody and hum along with the tune. And when my own counterpoint fails in my Kinyarwanda conversation with the waitress, we can plaster up the rhythmic holes in French.
Don’t hire me as an interpreter in these tongues, or for the love of God, between them. But after three months on the road, working in or passing through five countries and eight languages, it’s comforting to cozy up in familiar sounds, to feel at home in these grammars, at least, and to be close enough to get some meaning but far enough, still, to hear the song.
