It's not what you say it's the way that you say it

Yesterday I was talking to  a friend about babies and learning languages. I am not a natural linguist. Even my own native tongue was a bit of a struggle and my parents sent me to elocution lessons where I learnt to say things like

Knobbly knees, knobble knees,
Bend a little, if you please,
Whether knees are thin or fat,
They should bend as much as that,
So knobbly knees, knobbly knees,
Bend a little if you please.

I could keep my parents entertained for hours repeating such rhymes, we all got our moneys' worth from those elocution lessons.

How useless I was at languages was brought home to me with a bang when I started secondary school. We had been on holiday to France, camping, the summer before I started secondary school. My father whizzed us round France  getting by with a few phrases. We arrived at aa hotel, 'un chambre', we wanted to leave a restaurant, 'l'addition' and so on, My brother and I gazed at him in awe as he shrugged his shoulders, smiled and immediately everyone knew what he wanted to say. We learned a lot about the art of communication from hi. 'It's not what you say, it's the way that you say it,' was one of his most often repeated phrases. Sometimes he would use the dog to illustrate his point. In a cross voice he would say' you are a beautiful dog', as if by magic she would skulk into her basket, looking chastened. Then he would say' you horrible smelly dog' and she would bounce out of her basket and run round the kitchen and look at us in adoration.

My first French lesson at secondary school then. The teacher asked us to write down all the French we knew. Eagerly and confidently I wrote;


San Fairy Anne (Ca ne fait rien)
Kel er ay teel. (Quelle heure est-il?'

After all, these were some of the phrases I had heard all summer. They sounded good when my father said them.
Imagine my horror when I saw how they were actually spelled.

I have spent most of my life in a country where I do not use my mother tongue, my native language on a daily basis. Most of the English mother tongue speakers I know do not live in England, our English is stuck in a time warp. We do not naturally say things like, '24/7 or furlough, or I'll go for the tuna in breadcrumbs with a sliver of parmesan and a side dish of rocket salad. We were brought up with scampi and chips, gammon steak and smoked haddock for tea, boiled egg with soldiers and peaches from a tin.

Back to my friend and the bi lingual brain. I haven't got one. I speak old fashioned English and Italian with an English accent and still make mistakes which cause laughter.

In the last forty years mixed marriages over Europe have become very commonplace. It's not rare at all to have two parents both speaking a different native tongue and living in a country that neither of them were born in. Their children could easily grow up speaking three of four languages quite effortlessly.

What effect does this have on the human brain' Does it make a difference or not? Is it a good thing to have one mother tongue and then learn other languages? Does it matter?
As in all things it's good to be light hearted but not superficial.

I have come a long way from what my friend was telling me.
She told me about the Chinese alphabet which is based on imagery rather than sounds and the Japanese alphabet and the difference in the brain.

I must have switched off then because I got a bit worried about my own brain and the humiliation of writing 'San Fairy Anne' came back to me and even after all these years it makes me feel such a failure, or as my dad said often in France when people looked at him in puzzlement, 'Jazz we stupide' 'Je suis stupid'.

However does it matter? As my dad  said 'it's the way you say it not what you say.' Communication is what's important.