‘Did you go to the toe doctor?’ I asked my three-year-old grandson, Patrick, recently.
He looked at me with a completely blank expression, the sort of look that suggested he was wondering whether his nanny had finally lost the plot.
I tried again.
‘Did he tickle your toes?’
Still nothing.
I decided it was probably best to abandon the conversation and move on to something safer. But just as I was about to give up, Patrick turned to me, raised his voice and announced, with the confidence of someone who clearly knew far more than I did:
‘Nanny! I don’t go to a toe doctor. I go to a podiatrist.’
Well, there you have it.
I should have known. This child is clever. He has big words. And apparently, I am the one who needs educating.
Where had that come from?
It took me back to when my youngest child, Sarah, was about the same age.
I’m not entirely sure I knew Sarah could actually talk at three. Her older siblings had taken over that department. They answered for her, interpreted for her and, as I recall, generally spoke on her behalf.
Sarah did have one particular sound she made when she wanted a drink. Something along the lines of “mmmmub.”
Her siblings understood perfectly.
‘She wants a drink.’
And that was that.
So imagine my surprise one day when Sarah and I were walking hand in hand down a street in North Hobart.
We were having one of those lovely, ordinary little mother-and-daughter outings that you don’t realise are precious until many years later.
Suddenly, she looked across at the cars parked along the side of the road and said, as clearly as anything:
‘There’s a Lamborghini.’
I stopped.
A Lamborghini?
Sure enough, there it was.
And she had said it perfectly.
I remember being quite amazed. Where had that come from?
Colonisation and Language Death
I’ve always been fascinated by languages, particularly Indigenous languages. Perhaps it’s because a language is so much more than a way of communicating. It carries the stories, history, humour and knowledge the people who speak it. So it makes me deeply sad to think about the many Indigenous languages that have disappeared, and those that are now at risk of disappearing.
Colonisation has played a devastating role in this loss. When cultures are taken over and Indigenous people are persecuted, displaced or punished for speaking their mother tongue, that mostly results in the demise of the language. Parents may stop teaching it to their children, children may grow up speaking the dominant language, and gradually the chain of transmission is broken. Many Indigenous languages were never written down, either, but lived through the spoken word. When the elders who carried that knowledge died without passing it on, entire languages disappear with them.
M fascination with languages has also focused on people learning them. I’ve been intrigued by migrants learning a new language in an unfamiliar country, by school students wrestling with learning a new language, and by those extraordinary people who seem to absorb languages almost effortlessly — as though their brains were specially wired for it.
I have never been one of those people.
Slow Down Please!
French, in particular, has always been difficult for me. I can read some French reasonably well, but listening to it is another matter altogether. The French seem to speak at a speed that suggests they have somewhere much more important to be. By the time I’ve worked out what the first part of the sentence meant, they’re already three sentences ahead.
Of course, the French might say that Australians speak quickly too. I’m not convinced. To my ears, we have more of a slow, lazy drawl — words stretched out as though we’ve got all day to get to the end of the sentence.
The Pesky Idiomatic Expressions
Why, when learning another language, does everyone insist on saying things that have absolutely nothing to do with the actual words they are using? There are so many great examples of that in the comedy movie, How to talk Australians. The movie is about a group of students from the fictional Delhi College of Linguistics who travel to Australia to learn the language and culture through immersion.
Toddler Language
But since having grandchildren, I’ve developed a whole new fascination with language — watching little people acquire it almost before your eyes.
It seems to happen overnight.
One minute they’re making sounds that only their parents and siblings understand, and the next minute they’re correcting their grandmother about podiatrists.
And it’s not just the big words that fascinate me.
It’s the little words.
The ones they invent.
The ones they get adorably wrong.
My oldest grandchild, Kieran, used to say “nunnuks” instead of “nuggets.”
He loved chicken nuggets, so “nunnuks” featured quite regularly in our family vocabulary.
Of course I knew that one day he would say “nuggets” properly.
But when that day finally came, I was strangely sad.
“Nunnuks” was gone.
Just like that.
Of course, you would never want your child to talk like a baby forever. The whole point is that they learn, grow and find their way with language. But perhaps that’s why those little mistakes are so precious. They’re fleeting moments in childhood — and once the correct word arrives, the wonderfully incorrect one disappears, never to be heard again.
So, I suppose Patrick was right.
He doesn’t go to the toe doctor.
He goes to a podiatrist.
And I suspect he’ll be correcting my vocabulary for many years to come.
Featured Image: Thanks to Unsplash Published on August 31, 2022 (UTC)
