from the shores of my mother tongue.
My state of mindlessness manifested itself in bizarre ways. I couldn’t name the president of the country I lived in; I didn’t know how to dial whatever the Swiss version was of 911. When I noticed that the grass medians in our neighborhood had grown shaggy with neglect, I momentarily thought, “I should call the city council,” and then abandoned the thought: it seemed like scolding someone else’s kids. Because I never checked the weather, I was often shivering or soaked. Every so often I would walk out the door and notice that the shops were shuttered and no one was wearing a suit. Olivier called these “pop-up holidays”—Swiss observances of which we’d failed to get wind. Happy Saint Berthold’s Day!
In Michel Butor’s 1956 novel Passing Time, a French clerk is transferred to the fictitious English city of Bleston-on-Slee, a hellscape of fog and furnaces. “I had to struggle increasingly against the impression that all my efforts were foredoomed to failure, that I was going round and round a blank wall, that the doors were sham doors and the people dummies, the whole thing a hoax,” the narrator says. Geneva felt similarly surreal. The city seemed a diorama, a failure of scale. Time unfurled vertically, as though, rather than moving through it, I was sinking down into it, like quicksand. I kept having a twinge in the upper right corner of my chest. It felt as though someone had pulled the cover too tight over a bed.
The gods punished their enemies by taking away their voices. Hera condemned Echo, the nymph whose stories so enchanted Zeus, to “prattle in a fainter tone, with mimic sounds, and accents not her own,” forever repeating a few basic syllables. First God threw Adam and Eve out of the garden. Then he destroyed the Tower of Babel, casting humankind out of a linguistic paradise—where every object had a name and every name had an object and God was the word—in a kind of second fall. Language, as much as land, is a place. To be cut off from it is to be, in a sense, homeless.
Without language, my world diminished. One day I read about a study that demonstrated the importance of early exposure to language: in families on welfare, parents spoke about 600 words an hour to their children, while working-class parents spoke 1,200, and professional parents 2,100. By the time a child on welfare was three, he had heard 30 million fewer words than many of his peers, leaving him at an enduring disadvantage. I wondered how many fewer words I heard, read, and spoke each day in Geneva, deducting the conversations I couldn’t make out; the newspaper headlines I neglected to absorb; the pleasantries that I failed to utter, from which serendipitous encounters didn’t occur.
The back of our apartment overlooked a paved courtyard, where more senior residents of the building parked their cars. We didn’t have air-conditioning. Neither did anyone else. In the evening, when the weather was hot, people retracted the yellow and orange canvas awnings that shrouded their balconies, rolled up the metal shades that kept their homes dark as breadboxes, and flung open their windows, disengaging the triple perimeter of privacy that regimented Swiss domestic life. Pots clattered. Onions sizzled. A dozen conversations washed into our kitchen, the flotsam and jetsam of a summer night. There were blue screens, old songs, mean cats. Somebody was serving a cake.
It was a disorientingly intimate score. This wasn’t the suburbs. Nor was it New York, or even London, where alarm clocks were the only sounds you ever heard. Family life, someone else’s plot, was drifting unbidden into our home. It slayed me—a reminder of all I wasn’t taking part in, couldn’t grasp, didn’t know. Olivier took my melancholy as an affront. I was angry about being in Geneva, he calculated; he was the reason we were in Geneva; therefore, I was angry at him. He got defensive. I got loud. He would shush me, citing the neighbors, a constituency with which I had no truck. I felt as though I were living behind the aural equivalent of a one-way mirror. I didn’t think that anyone could hear my voice.
BY LINGUISTS’ BEST COUNT, there are somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 languages—almost as many as there are species of bird. Mandarin Chinese is the largest, with 848 million native speakers. Next is Spanish, with 415 million, followed by English, with 335 million. Ninety percent of the world’s languages are each spoken by fewer than a hundred thousand people. According to UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, eighteen of them—Apiaká, Bikya, Bishuo, Chaná, Dampelas, Diahói, Kaixána, Lae, Laua, Patwin, Pémono, Taushiro, Tinigua, Tolowa, Volow, Wintu-Nomlaki, Yahgan, and Yarawi—have only a single speaker left.
The existence of language, and the diversity of its forms, is one of humankind’s primal mysteries. Herodotus reported that the pharaoh Psammetichus seized two newborn peasant children and gave them to a shepherd, commanding that no one was to speak a word within their earshot. He did this “because he wanted to hear what speech would first come from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct babbling.” Two years passed. The children ran toward the shepherd, shouting something that sounded to him like bekos, the Phrygian word for bread. From this, the Egyptians concluded that the Phrygians were a venerable race.
In the thirteen century, the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II performed a series of ghoulish experiments. According to the Franciscan monk Salimbene of Parma, he immured a live man in a cask, to see if his soul would escape. He plied two prisoners with food and drink, sending one to bed and the other out to hunt, and then had them disemboweled, to test which had better digested the feast. His research culminated with newborns, “bidding foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no wise to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.” What happens when humans are prevented from acquiring language in the normal manner is impossible to know because it is unconscionable to facilitate—“the forbidden experiment.”
Plato, Lucretius, Cicero, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Emerson all tried to explain, in one way or another, how languages evolved, and why there are so many of them. The question proved intractable enough that in 1865 the founders of the influential Société de Linguistique de Paris banned the discussion entirely, declaring, “The Society will accept no communication dealing with either the origin of language or the creation of a universal language.” For much of the twentieth century the prohibition held, and the subject of the origin of language remained unfashionable and even taboo. Interest in language has resurged in recent years, alongside advances in brain imaging and cognitive science, but researchers—working in disciplines as diverse as primatology and neuropsychology—have yet to establish a definitive explanation of the origins and evolution of human speech. The linguists Morten Christensen and Simon Kirby have suggested that the mystery of language is likely “the hardest problem in science.”
However people got to be scattered all over the earth, spouting mutually unintelligible tremulants and schwas and clicks, their ways of life are bound up in their languages. In addition to the various strangers with whom I couldn’t interact in any but the most perfunctory of ways, there was Olivier’s family, who now qualified as my closest kin by several thousand miles.
Olivier’s brother Fabrice was thirty-two, an intensive care doctor in Paris. Their half brother, Hugo, was fifteen, a high-schooler near Bordeaux. They both spoke some English, but having to do so was an academic exercise, an exam around the dinner table that I hated to proctor. Their father, Jacques, a kind and raspy-voiced occupational doctor in Bordeaux, wrote beautifully—he’d studied English, along with German, in high school, and later taken an intensive course—but we had trouble understanding each other in conversation. I was unable to determine whether I considered Olivier’s mother, Violeta, the ideal mother-in-law even though or because we were unable to sustain more than a five-second conversation in any language. A trained nurse, she worked as an administrator at a nursing home. She was the head of the local health care workers’ union, and had recently led a strike in scrubs and three-inch heels. She and her second husband, Teddy, spoke no English whatsoever.
The
