O que quer [e] o que pode essa língua ? (Caetano Veloso, Língua)

Brazilian MPB singer Caetano Veloso asks, ‘What does this language want and what can it do?’, inviting us to consider language and its power. Languages have been hugely dominant across colonizing periods and civilizing missions worldwide. But how is language learning for adults? What are the unexpected challenges?

How people deal with languages in the learning process is complex and subjective. According to Revuz (1998), only some people are ready to learn it. Foreign language words do not have the same meanings as those in our mother tongues. Everything sounds different! Yet, learning a foreign language is like returning to our childish age. Language sounds are not associated with our sound references and mouth movements.

To Revuz (1998, 226-227) ‘[t]hese issues of investment or counter-investment in a foreign language are more accessible to observe when accompanied by vivid psychic suffering’. She adds, ‘learning a language is always, in a way, becoming otherness’. According to the Collins English Dictionary ‘otherness’ is ‘the state or fact of being different or distinct’.

Moreover, she states it is a breaking or lost double experience when we learn the other’s language. Yet, it is a more violent breaking when one goes abroad, to a foreign country. Revuz (1998) says that expressing yourself in another language is the critical point.

It is quite the opposite when one learns one’s mother tongue. Our minds are not full of sentences from the other’s language. Our brain works hard to put things in the right place. More subjective aspects, such as language collocations, slang, false cognates, cultural terms, and so on, are learned later.

Overseas, the more you learn a foreign language, the more you feel you belong to this culture, whereas you feel more detached from your mother language and culture community.

Revuz (1998) points out that learning another language progresses in social, cultural, and familiar discourses. It is facing a silent space where one must reinvent himself or herself to say ‘I’.

Therefore, she concludes that learning a foreign language is experiencing one’s strangeness while at the same time becoming acquainted with the differences between the language and the community in which one is living. Thus, when we dream of the local foreign language, it means a conflicting battle between living the other’s language and keeping one’s own language.

References:

REVUZ, C. A língua estrangeira entre o desejo de um outro lugar e o risco do exílio. In: SIGNORINI, I. (org.) Língua(gem) e identidade: elements para uma discussão no campo aplicado. Campinas, SP: Mercado das Letras, 1998, p. 213-230. (Tradução de Silvana Serrani-Infante).

VELOZO, C. Língua. Canção lançada em 1984. Álbum: Velô.