ACCENT ON FRENCH, by guest blogger Francie Gow

I may not be able to fool everybody all the time, but my French accent is finally good enough to allow me to blend in with the Francophones around me. Actually, it would be more accurate to say my French accents, as I find myself adjusting to the environment depending on whether I am in Quebec or in France.

I don’t think I was born with a particular talent for accents; I simply had and found the right opportunities. When I was four years old, my parents signed me up for violin lessons, and my musical education continued through my early university years. I also taught some violin in my late teens and early twenties. The sense of pitch I developed while tuning all those tiny violins before each beginner fiddle class has helped me hear and imitate the nuances of spoken French. I have no doubt that Susan’s background in piano has contributed to her own ease in distinguishing the sounds of new languages.

I was also fortunate to have been taught in my early years by several native French speakers, mostly from Quebec, as well as by Anglophones who had previously spent a significant amount of time in French environments. When I later taught English conversation courses in France, I could hardly blame the students for speaking English with such thick French accents; most of their teachers did too!

After high school, I spent summers in French-language programs in Quebec, studied French at Memorial University (one of my most helpful courses there was in French phonetics—I highly recommend glancing through the guide to phonetic symbols that appears in the front of any good dictionary), lived and worked in France for a year, studied translation and worked as a French-to-English translator in Ottawa, and then studied law in a bilingual program in Montreal. As I mentioned in my first post, I also fell for a handsome Francophone while in Ottawa and am now fully integrated into his French-speaking family.

In other words, with some help from those early advantages I mentioned, I have developed my accent through a slow and steady evolution, and through thousands of hours of listening and speaking. My only regret is that I have no memory of how I sounded at various stages of my French-language development. I wish I had recordings of myself speaking French in primary school, at the end of high school, after my French degree, and again just after my return from France. If your child is learning a language that he or she does not already speak natively, you may want to squirrel away some samples now to play back at a later date.

FRENCH IMMERSION AND BEYOND, by guest blogger Francie Gow

I first met Susan in 1982 when our parents enrolled us in the first French immersion class to be offered at our primary school in St. John’s, Newfoundland. We quickly became inseparable, no doubt because of our shared love of language and wild imaginations, and we remained close even after her family moved away in high school. Like Susan, I took to French immersion like a duck to water, despite the fact that our parents did not speak French.

My Dutch-born mother lives primarily in English, her second language, and she came away from her psychology degree with a firm belief in the benefits of second-language learning for children’s brain development.

My father was brought up in Ontario speaking only English, but a commitment to pan‑Canadian bilingualism was really taking off in those latter years of Pierre Trudeau’s leadership, and Dad wanted to make sure that I had the opportunities that came with speaking both of the country’s official languages.

My mother had intended to teach me Dutch at home, and, though I do not remember this, I even had a Dutch-speaking nanny for a while. However, when I was 20 months old, my sister Emily was born with severe cerebral palsy, and my parents’ priorities naturally turned to her rehabilitation.

After graduating from high school, I built on my French in a variety of ways, culminating in a graduate degree in French-to-English translation. While studying in Ottawa, I met the love of my life, a French-speaking Ontarian who speaks near-perfect English and very good Spanish, and who also happens to be the son of two marvellous English-to-French translators.

I am now a legal translator in Montreal, and French is the language I speak most often both at home and at work. I recently realized that my parents’ early decision to facilitate my learning of French has defined almost every aspect of my adult life.

In future posts, I will go into more detail about my experience in learning French, which Susan has labelled a commonly taught language. I also have some experience learning a less-commonly taught language, as I decided to make a real effort to learn Dutch in my early 20’s. I am by no means fluent, but I can now communicate with members of my extended family who do not speak English, and I feel much more connected to my family history. 

Of course, this blog is called LinguistKids. Although I never learned to produce any Dutch as a child, I will explore how some of my early exposure to the language supported my later efforts to acquire it.

Thank you for inviting me to contribute, Susan, and I look forward to chatting with you all in this space!  

A Short Linguistic Memoir

I took the city bus to school when I was growing up in Newfoundland.  We lived in a townhouse on Craigmillar Avenue, with its back facing the South Side Hills, and the school that I attended through the sixth grade was across town, up a steep hill from Downtown and St. John's Harbour.  My parents didn't own a car when I started kindergarten at Bishop Feild Elementary, so my mother and I were on the Route 1 Metrobus when I started feeling a bit nervous about going to school all in French.


I had spoken only English up to that point.  My paternal grandmother was a New Orleans French speaker, a "Creole," as she called herself, but she had not taught my father to speak.  My mother was a "bayman"--that is, it had been enough of a challenge for her, when she'd first arrived in St. John's as a student at Memorial University, to speak English that was standard enough to avoid embarrassment.  Growing up in the isolated fishing community of Nipper's Harbour, on the Baie Verte Peninsula, she had spoken an English reminiscent of the West Country dialects, with a good dose of Irish English thrown in for good measure.


My four-year-old fears soon dissolved when I met my kindergarten teacher, Janette Planchat, and started my first day in the Canadian French Immersion program.  I was soon speaking French, if not like a native, at least quite fluently.  We had all our classes (except gym and music) in French up until Grade 3, when an hour-a-day English class was introduced, and we gradually got more and more English until we were down to two classes (French and social studies) in French by the tenth grade.  I wish that the French Immersion curriculum had been even more rigorous than it was and that it had remained nearly all French through the high-school years, but despite its limitations, the program was one of the greatest gifts my parents ever gave me.


My parents also encouraged my linguistic abilities by teaching me phonics before I went to kindergarten, enrolling me in a Chinese Saturday school for several years during elementary school, and sending me to a German Saturday school in the seventh grade and a German night class (for adults) in the eighth grade.  They let me listen to their Italian records and attend after-school Spanish and German tutoring for a while, too.  Indirectly, too, they taught me to value cultures and languages by sponsoring a family from Vietnam who had immigrated to Canada and making friends from a variety of different cultures.  When I was a teenager, my father took the whole family to Turkey for a year, and two years later my mother went back to graduate school and became an ESL teacher at the college level.  At the same time, I transferred to an American high school, where I studied Latin and joined the International Students Club.


I can still speak French, although I'm rusty after more than a decade and a half of living in the United States, and as a bonus, I also find it much easier than most people do to learn other languages as an adult.  I taught myself Spanish and Italian (at the intermediate level) as a college student, and I have also learned  some Korean.  I am now focusing on mastering Chinese and know bits and pieces of various other languages, including Turkish, Greek, and Georgian.


When I started college at the University of Chicago, my father went through the course catalog with me, and I learned, for the first time, that there was a field of study called "Linguistics."  I took my first linguistics course--Languages of Europe--that fall, with Kostas Kazazis, who was a phenomenal teacher and a wonderful person.  Since then I have taken advanced coursework in linguistics at several different universities.  I am particularly interested in historical linguistics, typology, and language universals.


I have a Master's degree in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa and am currently earning a second Master's degree, in Library and Information Science, from Drexel University and running World's Edge Books & Publishing and its new imprint LinguistKids.  I plan to return to graduate school for my PhD in linguistics once I am able to read academic articles in Chinese.


I am also trying to pass on my love of languages and linguistics to my children.  I speak to them in French and Chinese as often as I can, read them books in those languages, take them to Saturday and evening classes, and use most of their TV-watching time to play French- and Chinese-language DVDs.


I would love to hear about other people's experiences, and I welcome suggestions for future blog posts.  If you are an author interested in submitting materials to World's Edge Books and Publishing / LinguistKids or a translator or illustrator interested in working on one of our projects, please email your cover letter and resume to worldsedgepublishing@gmail.com.