Psychology Today, François Grosjean, 2d April 2019
Does monolingualism constrain the way we see the world?
Aneta Pavlenko has been my coblogger for close to five years. She has written wonderful posts in her areas of specialty and has greatly diversified our offerings. Aneta has decided to leave our blog, much to my regret, but her posts will remain as part of the resource we offer readers (for an index by content, see here). For her last post, she has kindly accepted to write about how she started her life in languages back in Kiev when the Soviet Union still existed and Ukraine was part of it. Thank you, Aneta, for these good times together and for having been such a marvelous partner!
For as long as I remember, my life has been multilingual, even if I didn’t think of it that way. Born in Kiev, capital of Soviet Ukraine, I grew up hearing three tongues. Russian was the language of daily life. Ukrainian was used alongside it in the media and in education. Parents had a choice between Ukrainian schools that taught Russian as a second language, and Russian ones that did the same with Ukrainian. The third language I was in contact with, Yiddish, had been outlawed in schools and was dying out. My grandparents used it as a secret code. My mom understood some and I got the gist from individual words: naches [pride, joy] and sheyne punim [pretty face] meant they were talking about their beloved granddaughter, and tuches [derrière] and meshuggeneh [crazy] referred to downstairs neighbors. Read more... >>>>