Glossolalia in the melting pot

One only had to sit on the front porch in my boyhood neighborhood, or at worst walk a block or two to hear other languages and accents. Ukrainians, African Americans, Greeks, Hungarians, the Jewish delicatessen owner, and West Slavs of every sort. Somewhere I read that 27% of the Central European immigration landed in the space between Pittsburgh and Chicago. Though I can't affirm the numbers, I can vouch for the experience.

Kids are good at imitation. So, though we didn't learn the languages they spoke, we mocked the behaviors and speech around us. My grandfather, the court tailor from Vienna, I am told, could speak seven languages fluently. German, English, Polish, Hungarian, Croatian were ones I was familiar with hearing.

Given the biases against Catholics and immigrants, however, my grandparents and parents didn't want us to stick out. They refused to teach us what languages they knew, though they spoke them to each other when they didn't want us kids to know what they were talking about. The strategy was, "Let the kids be Americans--forget the 'old country.'" I remember asking my grandmother to teach me some German when I was about six years old. The lessons amounted to about half a dozen words and then let off.

Even people's names, if they weren't already mutilated at Ellis Island, disappeared under the pressure of assimilation. The Wojciechowski family turned into Walters and Papadopoulos mutated into Peters. We build culture to make us secure and we abandon it for the same reason.

?Starting in high school, however, I became an?aficionado?of language learning. In the classical education system, we got four years of Latin, two years of Classical Greek, and two years of German. College brought more classics, plus French. By this time, I was off and running on my own, studying Spanish in summer school and fiddling with the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets. I loved it and kept on going. Besides the classical studies providing roots to many contemporary languages, unlike many of my classmates I suffered no resistance to language?learning?and no embarrassment trying it out. If grandpa could speak seven languages, why not me? Plus, our mock imitations of the neighbors paid off. My teachers were amazed that I could pronounce tongue-twisting concatenations of Slavic consonants at first try.