Somebody in Your Family Has Been Loving You in Their Second Language
Beneath the Surface · By Ali Daudji ·
At an airport, a father says, "I am very happy from you."
Six words. One preposition wrong. It is the largest thing he has said out loud in a decade, and his son hears the grammar.
I would have heard the grammar. I did, for years, without once wondering what it had taken to assemble the sentence, or why somebody with that much to say would let so little of it out.
People who live between two languages know the thing that explains this, and it rarely gets said out loud. The enormous sentences are easier in the weaker one. You can say something in your second language that would close your throat in your first.
A linguist named Jean-Marc Dewaele once put an open question to 1,459 multilingual adults who spoke, between them, 77 different first languages. Does the phrase "I love you" have the same emotional weight for you in your different languages? Which language does it feel strongest in? He published what came back in the Journal of Pragmatics in 2008. Nearly half of them, 642 people, said it was heaviest in the tongue they were born into.
One of them, a Finnish woman who is dominant in both Finnish and English, answered in three sentences. "Very different emotional values. In L2 (English) it's easy to say. In L1 (Finnish) almost impossible." Finnish, she added, is where the phrase is strongest.
Her vocabulary was never the issue. She is telling you what that sentence weighs when her entire childhood is standing behind it.
The rest of the responses are where this gets complicated, and I want to be straight about it, because they nearly sank the idea for me. A quarter of that sample, 354 people, said the phrase was heaviest in a language they picked up later rather than earlier. On the face of it that is the opposite of everything above.
Then you read what they wrote. One American woman said the heaviest form of it for her is in Spanish rather than in her native English, because Spanish is her husband's first language and the two of them have spent thirty years teaching each other their own. Others pointed to the language they had done their loving in, or the one that romance simply sounded like to them.
So the rule is not that your first language is the heavy one. The rule is that the heavy one is wherever your life actually happened. Which is the same problem in a family, and possibly a worse one, because two people at the same dinner can have had their lives happen in different places.
In a family that spans two languages, there is rarely a sentence that arrives at full weight for both people at once. Say it in the one your mother's life happened in, and it leaves her at full force and reaches you at a distance, understood perfectly and felt approximately. Say it in yours and the direction simply reverses.
Which means one of you is always arriving at lower volume than you left.
And it tends to be the same person, year after year, without it ever coming up. Somebody learned a language in their twenties, badly at first. Then their children's lives tipped into that language, and they made a decision they never put into words: they would conduct the rest of the relationship over there, on the flat side, where they had the fewest words and none of the music.
Nobody framed that as a sacrifice. It probably did not feel like one. It felt like the practical thing, decided once, and then decided again every day for years without being noticed by anyone, including the person doing the deciding.
From the other end it just sounds like brevity. It sounds like a parent who was never very expressive, who reached for the small sentence at the moments that deserved a large one, who took the worst news of your year and said "okay. okay," and then nothing else.
Eva Hoffman, who arrived in Canada from Poland at thirteen, wrote about the receiving side of this from inside it. Listening to her friend Penny say she was envious, or happy, or disappointed, Hoffman found herself translating not between languages but from the word back down toward whatever feeling it had come from. "Already, in that moment of strain, spontaneity of response is lost. And anyway, the translation doesn't work."
That is what is happening on the weaker side of the sentence. It is not coldness, and trying harder in the moment will not fix it.
Fluency is what we listen for when we are working out whether somebody means it. It is the wrong instrument. Fluency measures practice.
The obvious objection is that nobody speaks one language at a time. Families switch mid-sentence constantly. You say the whole thing in English and then put one word from the other language on the end, and you both know that word is the real one. That is true, and it is not a rescue. It is a workaround, which is what you build when the road is out.
And the flattering reading of all this, which I should kill before it gets going, is that difficulty proves love. It does not. People are halting for every reason there is. Tiredness. Working out how to tell you something you are not going to enjoy. Struggle on its own proves nothing at all.
What I would defend is narrower. Ease is not evidence either, and we have spent our lives treating it as though it were, handing our trust to the smooth sentence and our suspicion to the stumbling one.
There is no way for the person doing it to work this out alone. It would have to come from the other side, from whoever got the sharp sentences all these years and called them brief.
Which puts me exactly inside the thing I have been describing. Saying it means saying it in the language where I have all the words, to somebody who is going to receive it at half strength, and the one place I could say it properly is the one place I have almost nothing to say it with. Waiting for that to improve is not a plan. It was never going to improve. So it gets said badly, in the wrong language, more than once, which is the rate at which everything real in that family has always travelled anyway.