Nacho's niece

“Latin’s a dead language,” the ditty I learned at school announced, “as dead as dead can be. It killed the ancient Romans and now it’s killing me.”

The reality is that Latin’s anything but dead. In fact, with over 850 million native speakers in the world, it runs Mandarin Chinese a close second globally. If that surprises you, it may only be because we don’t call it Latin anymore. The language has come a long way since the collapse of the Roman Empire a millennium and a half ago, and it has evolved in different ways in different parts of that Empire. 

German-speaking Franks swamped Northern Gaul and, even when they learned the local language, they learned it with their accent and their stress patterns, causing syllables to vanish or to change beyond recognition, so fidem become faith (that’s how the Normans pronounced the word when they introduced it to good old conservative England, which never changed the pronunciation) and then foi in the branch of modern Latin we now call French.

In other branches of Latin, it’s stayed closer to the original. Fede in the Italian form of Latin, barely changed, or fe in what we like to think of as Spanish, where a whole syllable (as in French) has been chopped off.

Modern Latin is a massively widespread language. Of course, that owes a great deal to its use in the aptly named Latin America. There are nearly 400 million Spanish speakers there, plus a further 40 million – nearly as many as in Spain, with its population of 47 million – in the United States. Brazil is home to 184 million speakers of another variety of modern Latin, the type we call Portuguese.

In any case, the picture’s similar when we look at the world’s third most common native language, English. A massive majority of the native speakers of the language live in North America. Indeed, there are far more speakers of Spanish, Portuguese and English in the Americas, than in Spain, Portugal or England.

America. The great melting pot. Where, in particular, two of those languages, English and Spanish, are increasingly meeting and mixing. John McWhorter, my favourite linguist, quotes a sentence from a New York street scene: “Why make Carol sentarse atrás para que everybody has to move para que se salga?” which roughly translates as “why make Carol sit in the back so everybody has to move to let her get out?” 

I thought of all this recently when Nacho, one of my neighbours – we have excellent and extremely interesting neighbours – told me about his brother. Incidentally, this is unlikely to be the last Nacho story I shall tell, since he has some really good ones.

Nacho, fount of great stories

Like Nacho, his brother is a Spaniard from Valencia. However, he married an American and moved to the US. She’s of Irish extraction, which is hardly unusual there. I believe more people claim Irish ancestry in America than in Ireland. 

Her father was from one of those enormous Irish families and was sent across to America as soon as he was old enough to make the trip. He was met there by two of his brothers. He knew neither of them. Both had made that same trip westwards before his birth, or when he was too young to remember them.

When Nacho’s niece was born, the parents sensibly decided that the father would speak only Spanish to her, the mother only English, so that she would in time grow up bilingual.

The thing about language, though, is that it defines us. There is an ease about being in the company of someone who speaks the same language as you. Partly it’s because you don’t have to search for your words, you don’t have to worry whether you’re stringing them together correctly (that’s the process known as grammar, that dynamic subject so often reduced to soul-destroying boredom by schools), or whether you’re so butchering the language as to be completely unintelligible

There’s more to it than that, though. When I meet another Englishman, I know there are things I don’t have to explain. We almost certainly both know that “the tube” isn’t anything to do with toothpaste but the London Underground. It’s likely that we also share a whole set of connotations – the smells, the sounds, the crowded carriages, the voice telling us to “mind the gap”, the tube map with its black Northern Line and yellow Circle, and so on. It’s shared cultural background that binds us together.

But language can also, and far more often, cut us off from each other. It creates walls as well as bridges. I’ve seen an English shop assistant treat a foreigner with aggressive rudeness for communicating badly in broken English. I see someone like the hard-right politician Nigel Farage saying how little he likes hearing foreign languages spoken in a train in which he’s commuting. That’s an attitude that can slip into the views held by a frighteningly large English minority, who would rather see illegal immigrants drowning in the Channel than allowed ashore.

So bilingualism is much a bigger deal than it may sound. Nacho’s niece was taking a on a far more challenging task than something we could dismiss as “oh, what a nice thing to do.” And there were bumps along the way.

One day, her father asked her in Spanish to fetch him some “leche” from the “nevera”. Dutifully, she went to the refrigerator as requested and came back with the bottle. But she slammed it down on the table in front of him.

“Milk,” she said emphatically.

See? It’s not just a bunch of words. Or even words and grammar. Language touches our very identity.

This was all some years ago, though. Now, in young adulthood, she appreciates the value of having mastered the world’s second-most widely spoken language, Spanish, alongside the third, English. She’s taken out Spanish nationality. She likes to spend time in Valencia. A fine place for its setting, its beach and, I suspect, its boys.

In the end, she’s made a bridge of language, rather than a wall.