My family and I are outsiders. We speak English. Our eight year old son speaks fluent Danish; I speak reasonable Danish; my husband speaks and understands basic Danish. My son understands some, but does not speak, Greenlandic; my husband reads a little, and speaks basic Greenlandic; and I know virtually no Greenlandic, other than a few common words. We are a linguistic dog’s breakfast. (Yes, grammar nazis, I am being ironic).
With three languages in the mix, things sometimes get weird. When I am working, I usually take notes in a combination of English and Danish, using whatever words come more easily as I write, a mix and match within single sentences. Meetings are usually in Danish and I am internally interpreting on the fly. Even when I email in English, I often throw in Danish words that, somehow, don’t easily work for me in English anymore. I’m sure it’s horrible for recipients.
For our son, it’s trickier. Outside of home, his world operates in Danish and Greenlandic, almost without exception. He has few options for English translations, and would be too shy to ever ask. So three languages swirl constantly in his little brain. Even with a single language, children often come up with fascinating ways of saying things, based on a broad concept and an educated guess of what the correct word or expression might be. With several languages on the go, it’s no surprise that things get strange sometimes, as they did on the bus the other day.
While riding the bus with my son, two young children boarded with their father. The two looked remarkably similar, but with some subtly different features, prompting my son to start a discussion about identical and non-identical twins. The Danish word for twins is ‘tvillinger’, the suffix ‘-er’ designating the plural, as ‘s’ does in English. I had previously corrected my son’s invented word “triplings”, his anglicized version of the Danish ‘trillinger’, which means ‘triplets’. My son’s question about the twins on the bus was,
“Are they symmetrical twiblings?”
Passengers flinched when I snorted with laughter at this brilliant suggestion.
