Is Language a Tool or an Anima?

Last night we say goodbye to my closest friend here Matej, who is leaving for Israel on Tuesday. From pub to potraviny to park to apartment we drift, bottles passing non-stop from hand-to-hand. The calm summer night breeze cools down the alcoholic burn.

On our way to the park, Matej and I are walking some steps ahead of the group with David from Hungary. At thirty-one, David is ten years older than we are, but with a decade of professional DJing behind him and a full head of radically long and upright-resting dreadlocks on top, the difference between him and us has less to do with age than with life experience. The Czech Republic is the fifth country David has lived in, but having arrived but recently, he speaks English rather than Czech.

There is a break in the conversation. Following the silence, Matej comments, "It must be weird for you, to hear talking me and David.... You know, because we are two European guys, and for us English is international language, but I think it is different than in America or Great Britain."

David says "Yes!! We have many phrases that are common all over Europe, taken directly from European languages, but that aren't making sense in English."

"You know, when I first started teaching," I reply, "I used to have a really different attitude towards error correcting than I do now. I thought it was my job to make everybody sound like an American, and if anyone would say anything different than how I would say it, I would correct them. I don't believe in that anymore. People think differently, and there are certain kinds of  'mistakes' I really question the value of correcting. Language is a tool for communicating."

"Yeah?" says David, "Language is a tool? Many people wouldn't say that."

"Well I would."

"Yeah, but what about the spirit of a language? What is BLOWing my mind," he exclamates the point with his hands, "is when you are speaking a language like a native language that is not yours."

"How so?"

"I just can't imagine it! Hungarian is in my bones."

"I see, but also, languages change to articulate different realities. My English is definitely nothing like in England, and lots of minorities in America have had to form new languages to express their realities."

"Ehhh... maybe some minor details," says Matej, see-sawing his right hand doubtfully, "but it is basically the same thing," he concludes with a grimace. "Yes, really the same," agrees David. Matej wanders back into the rest of the group.

"Why do you think we are always smiling in America?" I ask David, with a tentative smile.

He smiles back warmly. "I don't know."

"I think it is because we are a pluralistic culture, and when you don't know somebody's language, you always smile to tell them everything is okay. British English sounds very cold and foreign to us. It really is a different spirit.

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When I woke up the next day, I thought of it some more. Realized that as an American, my ancestors spoke Polish, Russian, Yiddish, German (Switzerland), French or Dutch (Belgium), and probably more. It seems just as well as anything I am speaking English. Maybe my heritage, made possible by America, which is the most multi-cultural society I know, is the way I always see eight different sides of things at once, like faces on a totem pole.