This post is partly inspired by International Mother Language Day, which was on Tuesday, Georgia’s recent holiday to Cambodia where she got chatting with the locals, and my current field work in Nepal, which involves me spending my days talking a second language (Nepali) to try and document a third (Yolmo).

Today’s area of improvement for English is more something to do with the kind of English I grew up speaking, and the attitude of those English speakers. There are certainly parts of the world where English speakers are at home with linguistic diversity (Singapore and South Africa are two that come to mind) and of course there are many people for whom English is their second (or third, or fourth) language and inherently part of people’s multilingual lives.

I grew up in an Anglo middle-class suburb where speaking English was the norm. In fact, ‘norm’ understates it - I couldn’t name a single friend from primary school who I knew spoke a language other than English at home. Like many people in Australia I have a migrant background, but even though my grandmother was a native Polish (and German) speaker it never occurred to me that I should learn Polish - she speaks more than competent English and never spoke her own language with my mum.

We ‘learned’ language at school. In fact, if you look at my school records I apparently have ten years worth of Italian education, but you’d never know given that all I have to show for it is some arbitrary vocabulary and the ability to break out the occasional verse of a nursery rhyme. When I changed schools halfway though high school there was never any serious discussion that I should try and keep up my Italian, or try and catch up on their German or Japanese.

I certainly had friends in high school who had a greater love of language than I did - but it’s because I’d never been shown the intrinsic worth of learning another language. It wasn’t until living in Poland, and finally learning my grand-maternal language that it clicked. The thrill of learning to say things in the past tense, the realisation of patterns in your own language, and most formative thing for me on that trip was the ability to communicate with elderly and distant relatives who had never learned English.

Sure, I didn’t rush home and double major in Mordern language, but it gave me a much greater appreciation of the linguistic convenience of my monolinguistic lifestyle. Since my adventures my sister spent half a year living in China and learning Mandarin, and my parents are celebrating their mid-life crisis learning French. I’ve lived in Poland and Nepal and when travelling in other countries I’m much more aware of how convenient it is more me that I happen to be a native speaker of the language that so many use.

I’m going to cut this short before I steer into the usual platitudes about language broadening the mind - but sometimes the mind needs to be broadened before the language learning can start.