Glossolalia in the melting pot

One only had to sit on the front porch, or at worst walk a block or two to hear other languages and accents. Ukrainians, African Americans, Greeks, Hungarians, the Jewish delicatessen owner, and West Slavs of every sort. Somewhere I read that 27% of the Central European immigration landed in the space between Pittsburgh and Chicago. Though I can't affirm the numbers, I can vouch for  the experience.  

Kids are good at imitation. So though we didn't learn the languages they spoke, we mocked the behaviors and speech around us. My grandfather, the court tailor from Vienna, I am told, could speak seven languages fluently. German, English, Polish, Hungarian, Croatian were ones I was familiar with. 

Given the biases against Catholics and immigrants, however, my grandparents and parents didn't want us to stick out. They refused to teach us what languages they knew, and used them with each other only when they didn't want us to know what they were talking about. "Let the kids be Americans--forget the 'old country.'" I remember asking my grandmother to teach me some German when I was about six years old. The lessons amounted to about half a dozen words and then let off. 

Even people's names, if they weren't already mutilated at Ellis Island, disappeared under the pressure of assimilation. The Wojichowskis turned into Walters and Papandriopoulos mutated into Peters. We build culture to make us secure and we abandon it for the same reason.

Starting in high school, however, I became an aficionado of language learning. In the classical education system, we got four years of Latin, two years of Classical Greek, and two years of German. College brought more classics, plus French. By this time, I was running on my own, studying Spanish in summer school and fiddling with the Arabic alphabet. Not particularly brilliant at it, I loved it and kept on going. Besides the classical studies providing roots to many contemporary languages, unlike many of my classmates I suffered no resistance to language learning and no embarrassment trying it out. If grandpa could speak seven language, why not me? Plus the mockery of the neighbors paid off. My teachers were amazed that I could pronounce concatenations of slavic consonants at first try.