The Other Tongue

I'm not the type of person to talk about my lineage often. America is a nation of immigrants, and as such I think a discussion about any of our "homelands" is irrelevant by default. That being said, allow me to prattle on about my lineage and how it relates to my definition of American culture.

Quick rundown: I was born in West Palm Beach, Florida. My mother's family is Italian and she grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My father's family is English/Irish and he grew up in Tennessee, in a small town named Paris.

Being born to a Southern father and Northern mother was an interesting (and short-lived) experiment. It's shaped my entire perspective about the freakish North-meets-South setting where my story began.

Here, our lack of cultural cohesion is par for the course. When I got my first job bagging groceries, I didn't know that a shopping cart could have so many other names (carriage, buggy, trolley, wagon), but the customers did because they came from other parts of the country where these terms are used to refer to shopping carts.

Nothing is permanent or collective. There are only three cultural staples: Alligators, golf courses and the music of Jimmy Buffett. Are any of our residents fans of the Miami Dolphins? If so, I have no explanation as to why they would be.

Our "culture" is purely transitory, brought over by whoever moves here, and disappearing when they leave. To a region that only became habitable after central air-conditioning was invented not even a century ago, a word like "tradition" means almost nothing.

Almost.

In the last year I've decided to continue my study of Spanish, from the point where I left it in high school, where it was required of my study for all four years. Was I able to speak it fluently back then? No. Has my continued study required me to start all over again, relearning all of what little I retained? Absolutely.

But I'm diligent, and that's important because the number of people speaking it is only going to increase. It's influence will only become more saturating. I understand this and have no problem with it whatsoever.

Questions you might be asking: Why would you welcome the phasing-out of your native tongue? How would life possibly be made better because of this? Does it not make you feel like your country, the only one you've ever lived in, your entire world from the moment of your birth, is disappearing? Do you hate America?

To all ideas posited by the rhetoric of these questions, I say:

No, English will never be eradicated in my lifetime. It's too nuanced, potent, deft, and efficient. It steals from the languages around it. It takes new forms with each new generation of speakers. Ideas and emotions can be expressed beautifully or hideously. It's vocabulary encompasses the complete spectrum of sound.

No, learning Spanish, or any other language, will not make my life harder. It will be made better by expanding my perceivable world, not erasing it. Everything I said in that previous paragraph? How am I supposed to confirm it if I don't have another language to compare it to? (Fact!)

No, it doesn't feel like my entire world is disappearing. Why? Because my surroundings do nothing but disappear. What's stayed the same? Nobody can even claim that Palm Beach County, let alone the entire country, hasn't completely changed from what it was twenty-five years ago. When you live in a place that never stays the same for more than a year, your idea of community becomes more dynamic, not more static.

And finally, no, I don't hate America, because America is about moving forward, not recycling the same words, the same concepts, the same ideas for centuries so that we can "purify" all of our "traditions" and "values." Our "virtues" and "principles."

That equates to cultural incest, and progress doesn't come from fucking your idea siblings. That's some Dark Ages shit.

I wonder, too, why my maternal family doesn't speak Italian. Not a word, except when my grandfather watches The Godfather on TV. It all comes back to him, or something. I've always thought it was a cool language, even if it does have a penchant for the dramatic.

I was told when my grandfather was born that his father, typically, wanted the children to speak only English. I find this a disagreeable parental impulse, but I can understand it. I don't think America is a very forward thinking, culturally tolerant nation in 2012. I can't imagine what it was like in the 1930s.

I've already made my sociopolitical case for wanting to speak Spanish, but the motive that courses through my veins is that learning Spanish would bring me that much closer to learning Italian. Little by little, I want to reconnect with what was severed from me even before the woman I came from was born. (See, this thick sappiness could've really been driven home with just a little Italian.)

I think everyone should feel this way, even if they don't. My girlfriend constantly waxes lyrical about Tradition and has no interest in learning German, her paternal family's mother tongue and one her father still fluently speaks.

She might change her mind one day, but I don't know what it will take. Either the realization that life is precious and we only have a finite amount of time to learn and appreciate everything we are, were and can become, or a Gossip Girl plot twist that involves Blair Waldorf falling in love with a fictional German chancellor.

Either way is fine.

We all just end up where we came from in the first place.