foreign languages

Natasha and I have started talking about getting our children to learn at least one -- I would prefer two or three -- languages other than English. The best time to start, of course, is now -- Evangeline is only 3, so her language-acquisition skills are in high gear. She's perfectly suited for developing fluency in multiple languages, even if it's done largely passively, through children's songs or videos, and engaging her probably will draw us in as well.

Among the languages I've been toying with:

1) Spanish. This is a no-brainer. After English, Spanish is the most commonly spoken language in this corner of the nation. It's also a standard foreign-language option on many DVDs, which means we'd have access to quality movies in Spanish without having to spend any more money. It's also spoken throughout Latin America, much of the United States and in Spain.

2) Haitian Creole. Not a commonly spoken language, but there are Haitians around New York and New Jersey, in Florida, parts of Canada and -- of course -- in Haiti. Advantages are that it's a language I already speak, which would give her someone to converse with and allow us a measure of privacy in public places; it could serve as a bridge to learning French later on; and it's a language other than English. Even if no one in the area spoke it, it would still have value in that sense. Chief drawback is that there is very little in the way of popular entertainment like songs and videos that I have ready access to in Creole, which means I would have to hunt it down so she could enjoy it.

3) Esperanto. I'm afraid this is mostly for the novelty of it, and for the privacy measure, although I understand there is a wealth of literature for esperanto speakers. And it even has speakers all over the world.

4) Arabic. With political lines and alliances drawn the way are right now, I imagine Arabic will continue to grow in importance as a world language. Knowing how to speak some variant of it would be an asset for Evangeline as she gets older. The drawback here as well is that I don't know where to get the music or videos (or storybooks, for that matter, though I can't read and understand any of these languages except Creole) that she can enjoy, and I also would have concerns about getting her music that espouses religious views widely different from our own. (True of any foreign language, actually; it just looms larger in my mind with Arabic.)

I've always been fascinated by linguistics, and a manmade language like esperanto is intriguing for obvious reasons. It's not tied to any one nation or culture, it has no irregularities in its verb conjugations or other parts of speech, and it does have some credibility when it claims to being a good way for people of different languages and backgrounds to meet in the middle, where neither has the cultural or linguistic advantage.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what languages we should be looking into, or suggestions on where we might be able to find quality children's music in those languages? If they're songs we're likely to know in English, so much the better. That would help us learn the language too.

Also of interest to me are the various Englishes that have been springing up around the globe. There's Spanglish all along the U.S.-Mexico border, Singlish over in Singapore, and other daughter Englishes like Russlish, Crenglish and what have you. Some of them have even begun developing their own literary voices, which is all the more intriguing.

In many ways I'm reminded of the influence of the Greek and Latin languages as a result of the spread of the Roman Empire. You see the influence even in lands that Rome never conquered, like Germany (kaiser), Russia (czar) and even India (Qasir, a name). Now English has become the dominant world language, with the result that every modern language has gained English roots, at least for technical terminology if not for more mundane uses, and many languages have adopted other aspects of English writing, such as the English punctuation marks now used in Chinese. I don't know where I'm going with this, it's just mental meandering, but it is intriguing to think about how our entire world's communications have been Anglicized to varying degrees.

One also wonders about the ramifications of that, since the Bible records that God explicitly confused human language at Babel in order to keep us from growing altogether wicked ....