I’ve often wondered where my curiosity about languages came from. I took took two years of French and then a year of Spanish in high school. And then, when they wanted to start me in a sophomore level French class in college, I decided I’d rather start over again with something else, so I said, I’ll try Russian instead! So I took two years and then decided that I’d rather do art than languages and went off on that tangent for my eventual degree.
My dad is a native Spanish speaker, but will admit that he only had about a 6th grade education in Spanish, because after that they came to the States for school and only spent holidays in Guatemala. I remember him speaking Spanish with his mother almost exclusively, and we would all laugh when they would talk about maybe what we were going to do that day and then ask me if that sounded okay and I would reply in English, having fully understood the conversation up to that point. It was like this beautiful background music to my childhood and when I had to study it in a classroom it wasn’t nearly as much fun as Russian, but I still think if I were to do one of those immersion programs, even at this point in my life, I would probably get pretty fluent pretty quickly, at least conversationally.
In contrast, my mom’s mom’s family, all descended from native speaking Swedes, never really spoke Swedish themselves. Many of the cousins in my grandmother’s generation still used some Swedish words and phrases (and even a Swedish blessing over the meal at gatherings) and they remembered their older relatives speaking Swedish in the home and at church, but in their generation – one or two removed from the old country – it had mostly been lost.
Who knows what might have happened to the language processing centers of my little brain if I had heard English, Spanish, and Swedish spoken regularly during my childhood. The science of brain development says the language acquisition centers are wide open from birth to about 5 years. I might be a multilingual translator at the UN at this point! Anyway, that curiosity about languages has made it easier to figure out how to translate and interpret the Swedish Church Records. Also on the list for future research efforts is to see if I can help my dad with some of the Guatemala research, although those records are about as few and far between as Irish records, so that’ll be a big challenge!
Chasing Swedes 