There was a level of belonging that I hadn’t known was possible, in which your whole linguistic self could reverberate in the world, could weave into the world and return to you. In fact, even now, I still can’t talk about that night without my eyes stinging. A ríoplatense sea, composed of music, words, the word-music of home. Conversations rose, crested, overlapped like waves. I was at an airport gate, alone, about to board a flight to South America, where I’d be meeting relatives for the first time. The first time I was ever surrounded by strangers speaking ríoplatense Spanish, I was 16 years old. Always, every second, I experience it with a hunger and longing and deep love, for I grew up as an immigrant in three different countries, hearing ríoplatense Spanish only in my own home, as if it were my family’s private language rather than a broader public one. Our Spanish is weird, slanted, full of idiosyncrasies and its own insistent melodic twists. Ríoplatense is a word that means “of the Río de la Plata region,” i.e., from Argentina and Uruguay. Many of us who are heritage speakers have internalized the idea that our bonds with our mother tongues are lacking, that any flaws mean they are less ours. (Which, if you know a thing about the magnificence of cubano or mexicano or colombiano or dominicano or hondureño or guatemalteco or any other regional Spanish, is a loss beyond measure.) Not only that: in a nation where Spanish is treated as a low-status language, where television news can refer to “three Mexican countries” while supposedly reporting on Central America, where the infinitely rich complexities of Latinx immigrant cultures are dismissed and flattened into condescending tropes-well, in such a nation, of course the dazzling overlapping linguistic constellations of the Spanish-speaking world would go unseen. There is no word for “ríoplatense” in English. That said, though English dominates my intellect, Spanish is the language of my bones.Īnd if I am to be entirely accurate, let me say that it’s not simply Spanish that’s my bone-language, my marrow-language, but ríoplatense Spanish. The era of my adolescence and early adulthood that I spent swallowing hundreds of novels-which, unbeknownst to me then, helped make me a writer-all happened in California, and in English. I was primarily educated in English it is the language of my intellect, the one in which I can best vault and flow along the curves of syntax as I reach for meaning. I have spent most of my life yearning for more intimacy with the language of my country of origin, Uruguay. This why, when I was invited to translate my own novel Cantoras into Spanish, I knew immediately that the task would be transformative, in ways I couldn’t yet fathom. And yet, it’s also true that our relationships to our mothers-and our mother tongues-can be infinitely complex, nuanced, primal, and ever-changing. The idea that we can only have one mother is a narrowing assumption, both in our familial and linguistic lives. Memorizing this table will help you add very useful and important words to your Spanish vocabulary.When people ask me which is my mother tongue, English or Spanish, I usually respond that when it comes to language I have two mothers. Below is a list of the Adjectives, Colors, Shapes, Sizes in Spanish placed in a table.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |