Martha reviews the new book, Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich, a memoir about setting out to learn a second language in mid-life. Rich spent a year in India to learn Hindi, and became so fascinated with the process that she went on to interview experts about the mechanics of second-language acquisition and how it affects the brain. Publisher’s Weekly has an interview with Rich. Grant discusses an article about what happens to the mother tongue voice when first-language speakers of indigenous languages in India learn English and then spend years focused on speaking and writing in their adopted tongue. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Dreaming in Hindi”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
I just finished a book that’s a fantastic treat for language lovers.
It’s called Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich.
A few years ago, she was a magazine editor in New York,
But then her life, as she writes, buckled out from under her.
She survived a grueling battle with breast cancer.
She lost her job. She ended a romantic relationship.
And with her world falling apart, she writes,
I no longer had language to describe my own life, so I decided to borrow someone else’s.
She became obsessed with Hindi, so obsessed that she went to India to study it for a whole year,
And her book is one of the best descriptions I’ve seen of trying to learn a language in midlife,
Of watching that new world form word by word.
In Hindi, you drink a cigarette. Night doesn’t fall, it spreads. People don’t sunbathe, they eat the sun.
And acquiring a second language, Rich says, is like being rattled into new sight.
And as she’s stumbling about in this new vocabulary, in this new grammar, she absorbs a whole other culture in fits and starts.
This is a book that reads like a novel.
She hangs out with royalty in palaces.
She volunteers at a school for the deaf.
And she ends up singing in Hindi in this wacky version of American Idol there.
And along the way, Rich becomes fascinated with the academic field known as second language acquisition, or SLA.
And in the book, she interweaves interviews that she did subsequently with linguists and neuroscientists about the workings of language in the brain.
And Grant, she talks about things like how languages compete for space in the cortex of people who are bilingual.
It’s fascinating stuff.
Yeah, it’s very interesting.
It reminds me of an article that I read recently in, I guess it’s livement.com, which is some kind of project associated with the Wall Street Journal.
And there’s a fellow there, and I’m sorry, I’m going to mispronounce this name, but it’s M-U-K-U-L-K-E-S-A-V-A-N,
Who wrote a long story about himself and his father and the languages that they spoke.
And he’s Indian.
And the title of the article, of course, is very charming as well.
Do Anglophones Paddle in the Shallows?
And what he was talking about was whether or not Anglophone Indians
Really were completely Indian.
Did they need Hindi or one of the other many Indian languages
In order to feel truly Indian?
His father, for example, spoke six or seven languages
And described himself as someone who spoke English in half a Dugustan languages,
Meaning that he didn’t speak English very well,
But he spoke it with all the inflections of all the other languages he spoke.
It’s just really interesting.
This fellow, Kasavin, Kasavin, I don’t know, but this fellow writes,
Hindi shrank from being his first language to being his worst subject,
A subject taught with near ghoulish badness by a gaggle of women with large hooped earrings and Punjabi accents.
Reading this and thinking about what you had to say about this, what sounds like a remarkable book,
It occurs to me that both sides of this equation, both the person learning English who is born speaking Hindi or other Indian languages,
And the reverse, somebody born speaking English and who learns Hindi,
They both have something to learn from each other, but there’s something to be lost as well, right?
Right.
And he talks at the end of that article about what language do you cry out in when you stub your toe at night is probably still that native language.
But so many of those writers end up writing in English for a larger audience.
Right, right.
It’s a part of their financial responsibilities to themselves, right?
Because more people are going to read it if it’s written.
And certainly it will reach the shores of the U.K. And the United States
Where perhaps the article will allow career advancement that might not otherwise be possible.
Right. Well, it’s fascinating stuff.
We’ll link to both of those things on our website, the article that Grant mentioned,
And information about that book, Dreaming in Hindi by Catherine Russell Rich.
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