Native Tongue: Thoughts on Language

NATIVE TONGUE

Language is a “way to see,” my husband Ole says. He speaks two languages well and a couple passably. He slips into a new skin, though, when he speaks his first language, Norwegian. To hear those melodic cadences fall off his tongue is to witness a different man.

Yesterday his uncle Per Johan skippered us through a little archipelago in Orrnerfijorden, and as we floated by the charming cottages tucked into birch trees along the promontories, the men chatted about the history of the place and how his uncle had first sailed these waters when he was five weeks old. Or so Ole told me.  I wouldn’t know. The words are only sounds to me, although the crescendos and swells reveal what Robert Frost always called “The Sound of Sense.” There is a drama to listening to any language, and the rise of  vowel sounds which comes to a punctuated full stop is familiar to anyone who speaks. The pause of comprehension, then the response – the laugh, or the “ohhh.”

My husband’s first language gave him a passport to others. Would that I could slip into a new skin, the Northern wasters of Norsk and taste the goat cheese with a different name, potent and rich as gjeitost.  Just saying it helps me to see the smooth brown block, sliced off thinly and placed on a piece of buttered bread. “Yay Tost” I say. And I say it again. Gjeitost. Gjeitost. ..