Excerpt from Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Before meaning

Do you want to see our rabbits? asked Maura, my new friend, who at four years of age outpaced me by a year. She was speaking Italian, which I did not speak. I nodded. She brought me to a pen outside the barn with a mass of rabbits at its center. Looking closely, I could make out a few individuals, small clumps of fur huddled against the rabbit pile.

Do you want to see some bigger rabbits? she asked, still in Italian. Again, I nodded. In a nearby pen, much larger this time, were dozens of meaty rabbits flexing their legs, lurching around in the cage, hopping over each other, ignoring all the other animals including me and Maura.

Do you want to see bigger rabbits? asked Maura. I nodded vigorously. She led me to the barn, and we stepped into the sweet, stinking darkness. I could make out two enormous shapes, bigger than horses. I fled.

When Maura persuaded me the next day to reenter the barn, I could see, after I let my eyes adjust to the darkness, that the two animals were oxen, not gargantuan rabbits. Perhaps she had never said "rabbits" after all. Who knows what she had said? At that time, Italian was to me a bewitching confusion, boiling and streaming in all directions. Its connection to the actual world was tenuous and constantly shifting. It was only now and then that I caught a word with my mind; words were like fish, solid things making sudden, unexpected appearances, flashes of substance and meaning in the liquidity of language flowing all around me. You had to be quick to snatch them before they were lost in the fast-moving stream.

My childhood was defined by repeated immersions in unfamiliar languages. By the age of five, due to my family's winding trajectory through Europe and eventually to Canada, five languages had seeped into my brain to various degrees: Czech, the language of my parents and of my birth country; German, spoken by the orderly and temperate Viennese, who frowned with disapproval when my siblings and I spilled out to play on the grass of the city parks; Italian, the language in which I roamed with the wild Maura over a farm near the Dolomites, the language of a freedom bought by the harried neglect of parents far too preoccupied with the business of survival to keep track of my proximity to the well, where I was most drawn to play; French, learned in the back alleys of East Montreal, where we organized footraces and games, relying on the lingua francophona shared by the various immigrant kids there.

Then English—the language of authority and aspiration. I first properly encountered it at school, in strangely formal interactions with a pretty kindergarten teacher who spoke an English seasoned with a French-Canadian accent and who lavished approval on my ever-more-successful attempts to emulate this official language.

English would come to dominate all the others, jostling its way to the front of everything, like the big, loud, entitled sibling whose demands leave its peers cowed and in a state of ongoing disequilibrium. Languages can coexist in the human mind, but they are fated to live out an endless power struggle; languages that garner the favors and attentions of their host brain grow ever stronger at the expense of their fellows. And in the brain of an Eastern European immigrant kid growing up in Montreal before the enactment of language laws to protect French, the contest was nothing if not rigged.

But English also began as liquid. In my first weeks in that serene kindergarten room with its stenciled alphabet and cushion-strewn rug, English sounded like this:

taktheblicksenoffazinzerlappingwentheyfostedfringilybutalmofaid. Okay?

By kindergarten, I had experienced an infant's state of incomprehension not once, twice, three, or four times, but five. Many adults have no memory of ever being in such a state. For me it was a prolonged, recurring condition.

Excerpted from Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy. Copyright © 2024 by Julie Sedivy. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.