Julie Sedivy’s latest book, Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love, is a lyrical, wide-ranging combination of memoir (she recently marked her fiftieth birthday), scientific exploration, and cultural commentary. She describes herself as a “language scientist” who has taught linguistics and psychology at Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) and the University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada).
In addition to her academic knowledge of language and scientific research into it, Sedivy brings her own experience of learning five languages in her childhood. Her first language was Czech, the language of her parents and her birth country. German, French, Italian, and English were a combination of what she was exposed to on what she calls her “family’s winding trajectory through Europe and eventually to Canada.” As she writes of her first years, “My mother tongue, which was just beginning to come into focus, yielded to a fog of German in my Viennese preschool, which in turn was usurped by an Italian streaked with the Czech of relatives and expatriates who lived near us. Later, as I sought admission into the packs of neighborhood kids that roamed the Montreal streets, it was mostly Québécois French … But also vying for attention were many strains of English….”
Linguaphile is divided into chronological sections on childhood, maturity, and loss. Loss is perhaps a poor way to label her examination of older age, when people can be dealing with memory changes and increased slowness that result in harder-to-recall words. She is optimistic, noting that what looks like decline in a healthy older person might be simply a side-effect of learning. “Vocabulary continues to grow into old age, becoming a magnificent warehouse of words in which anyone might lose themselves,” Sedivy writes.
Throughout the book, she shares thought-provoking tidbits of information the general reader is unlikely to have encountered before. Did you know that infants learn new words more quickly from a familiar speaker than from a stranger, that the challenges facing multilingual people are largely political, or because the loneliness of private meanings is intolerable, we search for enclaves of agreement?
If you want to follow up on any details, Sedivy has included an extensive notes section. It offers more explanation from her, along with citations of works she chose for being accessible, reasonably available, and not too technical for the nonspecialist reader.
Sedivy also wrote Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self and Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics and is co-author of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You. She lives in Calgary, Alberta. Gwen is coordinator of the Czech and Slovak Literary Ventures.
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