Language(s)

There are loads of differences between when I grew up and now, and I certainly don't mean to belabor them with tales of walking 10 miles through the snow on the way to school, uphill both ways.  But one thing that does really strike me is how easy it has become to be a cosmopolitan baby (which I mean in the Kantian, not the fashion magazine, sense): to live across borders.  Helena does that literally whenever we fly from Brazil to the US or back, but she also does it every night.

Rita is getting Helena ready for bed as I write, singing this lullaby we ran across on youtube, purely by chance:

Neither Rita nor I have learned the lyrics in Turkish very well, but we can at least do the "Dandini, Dandini" bit enough for Helena to calm down as night approaches.  Helena's other favorite videos are mostly Italian, like Il Katalikammello and Il Gato Puzzilone.

I compare this to a story my mother tells about a trip she took into Cincinnati with her grandmother; both lived in small town Kentucky, and the "big city" was out of the usual.  My great-grandmother saw two Mexican kids on the street speaking Spanish and said, "Wow, those kids are so smart!"

"Why do you say that?" my mother asked.

"Only two or three years old, and already speaking a foreign language."


I don't think that Helena will even grow up with the idea of "mine" as opposed to "foreign."  Her world is different.  How, I'm not entirely sure, but very different.