Dear reader, you know I love me a stunt memoir, from My Year of Living Biblically to My Korean Deli. But it's one thing to dedicate a whole year to, for example, reading the whole encyclopedia in hardcover (The Know-It-All), and it's another thing to marry a guy and move to Switzerland. When it comes to learning French language and culture, Lauren Collins went all in, complete with extended family, a H*Y*M*A*N*K*AP*L*A*N-style language class, and a lot of research on the history of simultaneous interpretation, Queen Victoria's efforts to learn Urdu, and prescriptive vs. descriptive linguistics.
If you have half an hour or so, you can get the drift from this excerpt in the New Yorker or the even shorter one in the New York Times. But I can summarize the story this way: Lauren grew up with no particular culture and gravitated towards men-- a "yo-boy," an "Englishman with two middle names," a "tall Tennessean" who seemed to have a stronger sense of self. When she finally met Olivier and realized he was the one she'd been waiting for, well, she couldn't even pronounce his name correctly, but his self-identity was secure enough that he apparently didn't mind. He also brought to the party not only a language and a nation but a full set of relatives, who of course had their own customs and manners, as extended families always do...
Interwoven with her own story, Lauren presents her research. She reviews the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the presumption that language shapes perception which paved the way for the discovery that people who speak different languages see colors differently. She talks about the data underlying a very common experience: it's much easier to talk about emotional situations and decisions in a second language. Turns out that's the "emancipatory detachment effect," and it's why missionaries want to learn and translate the Bible into "heart languages," so that the gospel won't be stripped of its affective weight.
And, in the end-- and maybe this is a spoiler alert, but, if so, a happy one-- she and Olivier start to build their own little bilingual family, taking advantage of two sets of vocabulary to describe that experience that is somehow both the most personal and the most universal, the most well-understood and the most difficult to explain in the world-- the experience of having a baby. A charming story and a nice introduction to linguistics... and remember, big chunks of it are available online!
