A Year at the Center of the World

My parents gave me many wonderful gifts, but among the top few--right up there with breastfeeding me, having a happy marriage, trusting me to make my own decisions, and putting me through the Canadian French immersion system--is the trip we took to Turkey as a family the year I turned fourteen.

We lived on the European side of Istanbul, not far from Taksim Square, and my younger sisters and I attended Lycee Pierre Loti, a school created to educate French children left behind in Turkey during the Second World War.  It was an ancient building, having been, before the Lycee was founded, a French Capuchin seminary in the business of training priests for the Greek, Syrian, Chaldean, and Armenian rites of the Catholic church.  My mother had had to fight to get us in, because, since we were mere Canadians--and Anglophone Canadians at that--our French surely wouldn't be good enough.  We were slightly worried they might be right when the application forms mysteriously demanded, "Do you sleep with your mouth open?"  We got in and I did have trouble--for about a week, after which I picked up the accent and eventually made it onto the honor roll.

That school did great things for my French and also seriously improved my German, which up to that point had been picked up from a year of Saturday school, another year of night classes, and a few months of tutoring.  My classmates took English as their third language (fourth for the 50% or so of the students who were Turkish), and a few spoke it well.  During English class I was allowed to sit and read my own English books; I had a reading list for ninth-grade English from my school at home and had added some titles related to our travels (we were reading The Iliad as a family, for instance).

Since we went to school in French, we didn't learn to speak Turkish fluently during our year in Istanbul. We did learn enough vocabulary and basic phrases to get along in Turkish at the markets, the banks, and the stores.  Some things we learned from the Foreign Service Institute Turkish Basic Course that my father had bought (I was mainly the one who sat with the heavy paperback book and listened to the tapes, and then I drilled my parents and sisters until they got the pronunciation right--I'd always had a good ear for languages), but most we picked up from reading the signs in the stores and bazaars and listening to the shopkeepers and vendors and the other customers.

I do regret that we didn't study Turkish more intensively and more formally when we had the chance to use it every day, but even the small amount that I picked up was valuable: for one thing, it was my second significant exposure to a non-Indo-European language and therefore expanded my understanding of how human languages work, which certainly made it easier for me to pick up other languages later.

The cultural education that I got during my year abroad was far more interesting and more important than  anything that I could have learned in school.  Seeing how people live in another country--but especially a country as different from Canada and the United States as Turkey--changed my life profoundly.  I can't possibly explain how in a short blog post, but some of the little things that stick in my mind, even eighteen years later, are the old men strolling along Istiklal Caddesi, the famous shopping street, with their friends, holding hands; the running water in our apartment being shut off twelve hours a day (we had to light the hot-water boiler with a match), my piano teacher's enormous Turkish rug and the servant who brought us tea before the lesson; the stray cats and dogs that haunted the streets and courtyards at night, and the people who fed them and cared for them; the way the poorest people smiled a lot more than the richer ones; the briefcases full of cash left casually on the sidewalk outside shops while their owners bought meat and bread on the way home from work; the stares that I elicited from walking around bare-headed in some of the provincial towns; the call to prayer broadcast from the minarets five times a day; the trucks painted in brilliant floral designs; the fruits and vegetables in the markets arranged with exquisite precision.  And of course our visits to Troy and Pergamon and Gallipoli and Hattusha were a history course unlike any other.

I learned that there no one culture has a monopoly on beauty, happiness, or knowledge and that a fresh perspective can improve any situation.  I learned that the way my Canadian classmates dressed was not the only way to dress, that their interests and prejudices should not limit my interests and understanding.  I learned that I should not judge other countries and cultures by what I heard on the news.  And I learned that the way I was perceived by the people I'd grown up with was not the only way I could see myself.

I hope that before my children grow up and leave home, I will be able to give them the gift of a year (or two or three) abroad and that it will have as positive an effect on their lives as it did on mine.

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This post is part of the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism.  Learn more about the Carnival and how you can participate by visiting the Carnival founder's blog, Bilingual for Fun.  Check out the most recent Carnival posts by visiting the host blog, Bringing Up Baby Bilingual.

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!