Dreaming in Hindi (3 page)

The rapid expansion of second language acquisition in the United States seems peculiar when you consider that it has occurred during a time when the state of foreign language study has never been bleaker. Thirty years ago, sixteen of every one hundred college students were taking French, Spanish, or some other language. Today that figure's roughly half. On the elementary and high school levels, there are a few bright spots—Mandarin classes for kinder-gartners in Oregon, for instance—but only a few. Despite all the fervent warnings about how monolingual nations will be eclipsed in the global market, in reality the government's cut back. The government has repeatedly trimmed funds for high school language programs. It has shuttered the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Language Affairs, thereby helping place the United States in the odd position of being officially monolingual, while also being the fifth-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. One count, in fact, puts the number of languages spoken in the English-only United States at about sixty, including Kansa, Ho-Chunk, Burmese, and Louisiana French.

What you get, then, when you look at the state of language study in the United States is mixed-up. On the one hand, you see what seems to be a spike in interest among adults. UCLA continuing ed has had to add levels to its language offerings to accommodate all the new applicants. The Concordia Language Villages, in Minnesota, has seen a zoom of 40 percent in enrollments in its adult division. (The average age range there is 47 to 67, though one of the matriculates is 92. He's decided to get cracking on German.) At the same time, you see kids, as a result of government policies, being dissuaded from studying languages at a time when their brains are most equipped to absorb them. "We spend eighteen years knocking language out of our kids, then spend hundreds of thousands of dollars putting it back in when they hit college," Dora Johnson, a researcher at the Center for Applied Linguistics, says. You see a thriving industry, SLA, positioned to study a population that's falling off. Which is not to complain that the industry is there, only to remark on the irony.

If half the energy that fuels SLA could be shunted into language study itself, we'd all end up bilingual. SLA studies is a spirited, exploding, and explosive field. Arguments break out over a host of concerns: Does a second language alter how we take in the world? Does the language instinct exist, and if so, does it apply to seconds? Is language ability, with both first and second, a special function in the brain, or is it part of wider cognition?

One of the more contentious pieces of SLA theory is the notion of a critical period. The question there is, Is there a window of opportunity that briefly and magnificently opens, allowing grammar, syntax, all necessary linguistic knowledge, to flow in till about puberty, when lateralization is complete? Lateralization is the period when functions set up in the brain. For most right-handers, the language systems end up being housed in the left hemisphere. Ethologists have come out in favor of a critical period, observing that the same kind of cutoff can be observed among animals. Goldfinches can grow up with accents. Teachers sometimes take a dim view of the critical period, having seen too many exceptions, while brain guys (occasionally referred to as "neurophiliacs" in the other circles), some of them, contend that it's not one window that shuts, but four or five, in sequence. Michel Paradis, a neurolinguist in Montreal whom I flew up to interview for the story, is of this belief.

"Prosody is the first to go," he said when we met in his quiet gray office. Files were lined up precisely behind him. Paradis, in a fitted light gray jacket, had an air of exactness about him, too. He was basing his argument on the idea that language is a function of multiple subsystems in the brain, each one a command station that depends on a network of cells firing thousands of synaptic impulses per second. One is in charge of prosody, or intonation, what Andy Kaufman made extreme use of on
Taxi.
Another is set up to control phonology, sound patterns. Separate systems govern morphology, the combination of small sound splices—"can" plus "dy"—into words, and syntax, or the ordering of words into sentences.

Most of them, Paradis believes, are subject to their own critical period, which concludes about the time myelinization occurs—that is, about the time the dendrites and axons, the whiplike connectors in cells, grow insulated enough to carry electrical impulses. This critical sequence, as the entire extended wrap-up is called, begins at about eighteen months of age and continues in phases through around year seven, setting all aspects of speech except one. Lexicon, vocabulary, is exempt from maturation. You can learn new words forever, or until your memory is shot, which is why in French or Spanish, vocabulary is easy for adults, compared to knowing what to do with it. Otherwise, once the cells that produce the cant of a sentence are firing straight, "you're stuck with your intonations and stresses. You can always tell a foreigner by the prosody. It's very hard to change," Paradis said.

For the past thirty years, Paradis has been studying bilinguals with aphasia, speech damaged by cerebral insult. Working backward from their silences and shuffled words, he's gleaned insight into how the brain processes languages, first and second. I'd come because I was curious about his deductions. All aphasia leads to provocative calculations. If language is what makes us human, then what happens when our humanity is suddenly altered through the violence of a stroke or an accident?

What happens with bilinguals, Paradis observed, is that people can lose one tongue and not the other, for a time, to a degree, or completely. His textbook
Readings on Aphasia in Bilinguals and Polyglots
contains numerous examples. Following a head injury, an Austrian commander, once fluent in German and Italian, was able to speak to his wife only in the remnants of his Italian, to his doctors only in what was left of his German. A terminally ill woman of "unreported age or handedness" could no longer speak English, which she'd used for the past twenty years, and reverted to Dutch, her mother tongue. For a long time after I read the book, I thought about these language ghosts, made to wander the debris of worlds they'd constructed, worlds that would sometimes flare back to life, then just as suddenly sputter out.

One patient, a Moroccan nun born to French parents, had slammed her head when her moped crashed into a car. Afterward, she could still speak French and Arabic, but only on alternate days. "On the days when she couldn't speak French, where did it go?" Paradis asked. He has many deductive theories, well regarded in his field, about why this might happen, though not about where the French goes.

"All knowledge divides into two types," he said, by way of introduction. "Procedural, also called automatic, is acquired incidentally and at a very young age: the ability to tie your shoes, walk up stairs, speak English, for those born in the States. Why do you make a word agree with the past participle? You don't know. Neither do five-year-olds, but they do it all the time." Five-year-olds naturally absorb whatever talk is around them. Mandarin, Slovene, Yo-ruba—it doesn't matter. It becomes procedural and wired into one stretch of the brain—gathered through the cerebellum, basal ganglia, and corpus striatum, he posits, then stored in neocortices in the left hemisphere.

All native languages, then, are a form of procedural knowledge. Procedural knowledge is a world apart, practically, from declarative knowledge, the other variety. Declarative knowledge is what you learn later in life: math, the combination to your gym locker, Italian in a night course. For the most part, new knowledge, Paradis said—and this explains a lot, if you're wrestling with a new language—is stored diffusely, all over the brain. Hence the space-bump feeling when you're trying to recall something recently learned:
How do you say "farm" again?
It's right there, on the tip of your hippocampus.

The reason, he believes, that a blow to the head could mangle your English but leave your sparse high school French intact is that first and subsequent languages—procedural and declarative knowledge—are processed slightly differently by the brain. They're handled by microscopic and varying pathways. A contusion or illness can affect one route and not the other, similar to how tornadoes in the Midwest sometimes level the houses on one side of a street but spare the ones opposite.

In navigating another language, then, you're not using precisely the same brain you do when employing your first. With a second one, you're flying through different combinations of circuits, drawing more on pragmatics—sense guessed from context and gestures—in the right brain, less on the limbic system, which is located near the base. The limbic system churns emotions, the gel for memory. The first time around, emotions help language set: "Bird? Bird? Can you say bird? Good boy!" your mother exclaims, to your gurgling delight. The limbic system, however, doesn't get revved much in language class. "
Où se trouve la pharmacie?
" the French teacher asks, but unless you've got a headache, who cares? Need and fear are what stamp words in the cortex. Heartache's an iron press. So's desire. A lover who speaks the language is a faster route to fluency than any tapes or courses, but perhaps more expensive.

As the interview was coming to a close, I inquired whether Paradis thought that a second language learned in adulthood could ever reach a par with a first. Even before the question was out of my mouth, I knew it was a mistake to have asked. As dazzling as that second world was already becoming to me, there could only be one right answer, and Paradis, I could tell by then, wasn't likely to give it. He didn't. "There's doubt as to whether, when you learn a second language late, you can gain procedural competence," he said. You can speed up your processing, he added, but you will always, for instance, have an accent. You will always be off by a beat, by a stress, detectably from someplace else.

Other investigations I conducted then were similarly dampening. Foreign language studies are a rigged operation, I learned. An estimated 95 percent of students "fossilize," the linguistic term for hardening at a certain level. Ninety-five! So accent's a given, perfection's impossible, and odds are you're on your way to becoming a linguistic fossil: good work. At some point, then, the question has to become, Why would you even try?

 

IN HINDI, YOU
drink a cigarette, night spreads, you eat a beating. You eat the sun. "
Dhoop khaana?
" I asked Gabriela Ilieva, a moonlighting New York University Hindi professor, first time we hit the phrase. "Sunbathe," she said smiling. "To bask in the sun." My mind, alert for ricocheting syntax, was momentarily diverted by the poetry of idiom, the found lyricism that's the short-form answer to the question of why you'd try.

"They really say 'Victory to Rama' when they answer the phone?" I asked a tutorial later, reporting what Chirag, a computer student I'd enlisted for practice, had told me. "Oh, it's no different from you saying 'Good God,' she said. Gabriela was originally from Bulgaria and conversant in eleven languages. Her mother was the most famous actress in her country—"like Sophia Loren," she said—which somehow gave the fact that she knew Sanskrit, Punjabi, and Old Church Slavonic an even greater gravity. Seeing that I still looked incredulous, she tsked: It's just what they said! She was practiced in knowing when to convert the extraordinary to ordinary, when to let the extraordinary stand.

It was the pull of these conversions that kept me returning now, their mimicry of transcendence—ordinary to extraordinary, then back again. Invariably, once a class, the assumptions of one language would collide with the other's, shaking me from the certainty that Aldous Huxley called "reduced awareness." Boosted, I could skid across syntax so alien that if translated directly, it would read like a computer shorting out. "India returning of before to us right here stay" could remain "Stay with us before returning to India" only if you didn't look down.

"
Hindimein! Hindimein!
" Gabriela would call when my energy drained and I took a spill: Think in Hindi. "Come on! No English!" she'd chide. "
Haan,
" I'd snort, meaning "yes," meaning "Why don't you just speak it?" and she'd burst out laughing at the look on my face. I doubted that she laughed maniacally at her regular students, but a while back we'd become friends, and anyway, they were kids, we were adults.

"Did you hear? Did you hear?" she'd ask at the beginning of each class after I'd applied for a Hindi program in India that Susham had mentioned. I'd done this for complicated reasons, not one being I thought I'd get in. I didn't fit a single entry requirement, didn't, for one thing, have two college years of the language. But I'd needed just then to see myself as someone who'd do something on this order, who'd throw "my whole life up in the air for a passion," as once or twice I'd floridly declared, a desire that stemmed from my truculent medical history.

The second time I'd gotten sick, they'd given me a year or two. The disease I had, cancer, was breaking bones from within, had turned vicious and insistent, when one night I dreamed I was fighting with a woman over a piece of cloth. The fabric was sleek and blue, beautiful, weft pressing warp in a way that caused ripples, and she was trying to take it from me. "But it's mine!" I shouted. "I made it." The woman grew somber. "You may have made it," she said quietly, "but that doesn't mean you get to keep it." A friend had to explain that the cloth symbolized my life.

I'd accepted that I was losing mine, when the illness went into one of those astounding reversals cancer sometimes does. It skidded and turned, leaving me in a perpetual state of spooked awe, with an impulse to keep my life narrowed. Though I'd fallen in love with a man when the disease returned, once that affair ended, I avoided romantic entanglement: too much anchoring to the slipshod processes of life, too much touch. My life became fortified, safely latched down, though I was left with a small, lingering need: to tell myself I was unafraid, of anything. Not because I was. In case I had to summon fast courage again.