Phrased like that, it sounds airy and fairy and very much like something a scholar would say. But that ain't me. I love language as a user and not as an academic. I get high on the communication. I see the words as valuable tools that slot into an overarching problem solving mechanism.
I love language when it allows for exchanges like the ones I had this weekend at the international festival that was hosted in Lindsay's town of Ishikari (just outside Sapporo).
Though Lindsay and Mark landed in the Canadian booth, my proposal for an Estonian booth was turned down as too eccentric, and I was assigned to the France booth. Apparently my fetal visit to the country and my French fluency qualified me. And according to Akemi, the festival organizer, my blonde hair and blue eyes make me the spitting image of a frenchman. So I threw on the closest thing I had to a beret and tried to class up my attire in a suitably Parisian way. To complete the package, I busted out my terrible French accent (terrible as it is accurate in a TERRIBLY creepy kind of way) and rolled my R's to Lyon and back for the perplexed Japonais. That had to be the best part as a potent, guttural, rolled R is pretty much the most linguistically foreign thing to the Japanese (with their R's coming out as a kind of limp fusion of an L and an R).
When I wasn't verbally terrorizing the Japanese, I delighted in conversing with some visiting scientists and researchers from a number of African nations. Their group had been invited to the festival through the same zoological impulse that inspires the Japanese to parade us whities around on stages and call it internationalization. But, when you start dealing in Gaijin (foreigner) currency, I'm pretty sure that the Japanese assign a little more exotic value to blacks than to whites (racist but true). Having a whole gaggle of African professionals show up, most of them sporting their traditional garb, must have felt like winning the internationalization lottery to the festival organizers.
For me, they were just an excellent opportunity to get back to using some of my French, which had started to wither somewhat over here in J-land. Though I was fortunate to have started studying a second language in kindergarten, when my mind was still young, supple, and a sponge for language (thanks mom and dad), I sometimes feel that I've only got so much storage space in my language-enabled mind. When I got over here and started using Japanese 24/7, my Estonian was the first to atrophy. I would boast about knowing Estonian to my students, only to have them ask me to speak some for them. I'd reach into the language-y parts of my mind, I'd try to switch tracks (the change from one language to another feeling almost that physical), and when I again opened my mouth I would utter linguistic abominations like "ma raagin nihongo keel."
Japanese had started to colonize the Estonian centres in my brain. When I tried to recover from these slips, I got a real sense of logofusion about it—feeling lost in the spaghetti of languages and words in my head. To get anything out in Estonian, I'd have to prefab the sentences in my head and deliver them carefully, assuring I didn't stray from my intended grammatical geography.
I worried that, given enough time, my French would start slipping away in a similar fashion: a casualty of my increasing Japanimation.
But, as I opened my mouth and spoke to these Africans, I just fell into the French. It was natural like swimming—instinctive like breathing. And, before I knew it, I was using words I'd thought I'd forgotten and phrasing sentences I didn't remember knowing. The change didn't seem laboured or physical at all as the kernel in my mind that allows me to dream in French just took charge. I fell so deep into the rhythm of it that when a particular man from Senegal couldn't speak English to the Japanese woman beside me, I had to consciously remind myself that I was speaking French, and I had to make a near-physical switch back to English.
Now, I don't know what that is, but there's a kind of power in it. Call it bilingualism or fluency, but the non-theoretical reality of it is understanding and communication. Such a cardinal thing was so powerful when fully realized at Babel that God would rather sunder the tower than allow man to achieve the further evolution beyond the barrier of language.
Ok, so maybe that's just me chasing down the myths that move me, but the tangible in it is the power of language. When you make a child bilingual, or trilingual, or quadrilingual, you only make it better. You give it a greater opportunity to problem solve and translate. You broaden its horizons and open up new worlds to it. When you give a child language, you change it's brain, and you make it powerful. I believe that because I have lived it. I will never be able to thank my mother and father enough for it.
And, should you ever be blessed with children, you should empower them with language, too. If you're in Canada, make it a priority to put them in French immersion. It doesn't matter if they have to take an hour-long bus to get to it. It doesn't matter if you can't French your way out of a paper bag (for all their touching effort, my parents couldn't!). It doesn't matter if they hate it and you have to force them to complete it. I guarantee you that, one day, they will thank you for it; thank you for the doors it opened for them—even if those doors are only in their minds.
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