Uvatiarru

Half of the world speaks one of only 20 languages as a native tongue. With the dominance of English in the digital realm, we're on track to even more language concentration.

I have always thought of language diversity as important for transmitting unique ways of viewing the world. For example, Canadian Inuit use the same word for "past" and "future": uvatiarru. This raises many interesting philosophical questions. (I learned that it the book New Slow City (2014) by William Powers.) But after reading the piece "A Loss for Words" by Judith Thurman in the March 30th issue of the New Yorker, I began to think of language diversity as a rights issue.

Thurman discusses forced assimilation of First Nation and native American school children - depriving them of the possibility to learn in their native languages - as a violation of rights. This was widespread practice in the U.S. and Canada, even after Mohawk Indians built Manhattan's skyscrapers, and the Navajo language - impossible for the Germans to decode - helped to decide the outcome of the Second World War.

There are 800 endangered languages in the world according to Thurman  - and NYC has a higher concentration of them than any other place in the world. What can we do to right past wrongs?

Thurman tells an inspiring story of Keyuk, a young man who taught himself Selk'nam, the language of his mother's ancestors, of which there were no know speakers. (He used recordings by anthropologist Anne Chapman from 40 years ago and written records - mainly translations of scripture - from missionaries.) Once he mastered the language, he found an elderly woman in Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America who understood him and in fact did know Selk'nam, but had deactivated her knowledge of it. A few days after their encounter, she passed away, as if she had been waiting for that final, authentic connection to her past.

Uvatiarru. The past is the future.

So, you must be fluent by now?

During the opening lesson of my rookie Goethe-Institut summer school course in 2003, I was amazed I could instantly understand "Der Fisch schwimmt," "Der Ball rollt," and "Der Apfel sinkt" (if you drop it in a bowl of water).

This was the first little pearl on a string of triumphs marking my journey toward fluency. How many beads does it take to craft an artifact?

Here are a few of the milestones that followed my immersion euphoria that summer. You tell me where I became fluent. Or am I there yet?

1. Realizing why, while shopping, store employees didn't leave me alone after I shook my head. (In Germany they don't ask, "Can I help you?" but rather, "Are you doing alright?" / "Kommen Sie zu Recht?")

2. Identifying a love song on the radio.

3. Grasping snippets of a passerby's conversation on a busy sidewalk.

4. Failing to tune out background conversations at will.

5. Successfully concealing my foreign accent from a curious stranger seated next to me on a train.

6. Identifying potential nuclear waste repositories as the topic of a radio program.

7. Holding my own in a argument.

8. Word play - on purpose.

9. Passing my statistics exam.

Goals up ahead:

1. Laughing at stand-up comedy in Frisian dialect.

2. Being a statistics tutor.

3. Simultaneous translation of the tour through the archaeological excavation under the Cologne Cathedral.

Fluent sounds so final. Once you are fluent, you can't improve. But even in your native language you are never done learning, not least of all because the language itself is steadily changing.

It is like my high school calculus teacher Ms. Perkins explained: you can jump half way to a wall until the cows come home.