Languages

What language will Chely and Kayalá use to talk to each other?
I wonder.

At our house it's easy to tell who is talking to whom just by noticing what language is being used. If it's English, it means it's me talking to the children, or Chely talking to me. If it's K'iche', it's Edwin and the children. If it's Spanish, it's Edwin and me talking to each other. Chely and her imaginary friend Pimbili speak their own language together; we call it "Pimbilese."

When Chely was first learning to speak, she would mix up the languages. She does so rarely now -- at least not with vocabularly -- though her grammar in any given language is a hodgepodge of the three forms. And sometimes she translates things directly from one language to another, and the result doesn't completely make sense. In Spanish you can say "está rico el sol" which basically means "the sunshine feels good" but she translated it literally one time as "it's yummy the sun"!

A particularly funny moment happened in Santa María Tzejá on New Year's one year when she mixed English and Spanish. The word "water" sounds a lot like "guaro" in Spanish, which means licor. In asking for water, she kept saying "quiero [I want] water" which to folks there made it sound like she was asking for alcohol! At the time members of Edwin's family were drinking a pineapple homebrew so it was particularly apt -- and particularly funny to them.

It is an incredible blessing to be able to teach our daughter three languages. Three populations to relate to, three ways to communicate, three ways to see the world...

I'll write more on this topic another day, but for now I'll just encourage you to participate in the languages poll located on the upper right-hand side of this blog (update 09/03: poll now over).