Roma il tram 14 © Julio Ortega/Shutterstock
A story about the impact that migration has on the language and languages spoken, developed during a ride on a Roman tram
A couple of years ago I read Tongue Stuck a beautiful autobiographical story by Irina Dumitrescu on her difficulty, she a daughter of the Romanian diaspora in Canada, to express herself in her mother tongue.
Like Irina, and like many other children of immigrants, I was born in one country and raised elsewhere, a condition that posed to my parents the dilemma of choosing their own family lexicon. They opted for Italian as the language of everyday life. Arriving in Italy in the early nineties, my mother and father suffered the illusion of the cultural and therefore linguistic superiority of the host country. In the autumn of 1991, we left a Romania that had just entered the democratic transition, committed to countering inter-ethnic tensions and the aftermath of the misery that Nicolae Ceaușescu had imposed on us over the course of the previous decade. We had left Stoina, a tiny semi-industrialized municipality in southern Romania, whose landscape alternated with a small conglomerate of buildings, famous communist residential architecture made of concrete parallelepipeds, a plain cultivated with sunflowers, small houses and an expanse of oil probes. Part of the Gorj district, Stoina was part of a large area rich in oil fields, subjected to intense extraction activity starting from the second post-war period. After all, the Romanian petrochemical industry had been one of Ceaușescu’s prides.
The hills of central Italy which alternated orderly cultivated fields, olive groves and wealthy Umbrian towns, could only be a clear expression of the primacy of this culture over that of the place from which we had expatriated. And yet, my first memory of Italy is not linked to the late medieval grace of Orvieto, but to a motorway service station on the Autostrada del Sole, in my eyes a demonstration of Western opulence: Tobleroni, colorful packages of sweets unknown to me, coolers full of salami, and videotapes of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Difficult not to be convinced by such abundance.
They tell me it was to allow my mother to learn the language that we abandoned the use of Romanian and Hungarian at home. Up until that point, both of my parents had spoken to me in their respective native languages. Today with more conscience I fear it was a surrender to a linguistic assimilation which they happily abandoned mixed with a desire to want to sever ties with their previous life. And then, how can we blame them, in those years no one else around us spoke our languages. The abandonment of one’s own language is one such a common dynamic among migrant communities that a linguistic definition has been attributed to it: subtractive bilingualism. A loss that Graziella Favaro, pedagogist, defines as “also generated by an experience of shame towards one’s own language considered not prestigious, a trait of one’s history to be removed”.
What then, what is the mother tongue?
The language of your ancestors? The language of your childhood? Which language is best mastered?
For every language we speak, we express an entirely different cultural background, with its own ironies, its own implications; for every language we master we are one, two, three different people, Sandor, a perfectly bilingual great-uncle, once intuitively explained to me, unaware that he was a Pirandellian at all.
At my birth, I was surrounded by affections who spoke to me in Hungarian, in its secret articulation. No sound is sweeter to me than the Hungarian idiom spoken by the Secleri. It is the language of my mother, my aunt and grandmother, of all the women and men who surrounded me with attention. For my first six years of life, it was the language of fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and prayers taught me from my own mamagrandmother. I am the son of Gog and Magog . I am the son of Gog and Magog, my mother read reciting one of his favorite poets, Ady Endre, a Hungarian from Transylvania, who wove verses that told of biblical characters that became Hungarian myths. Hungarian is the language of strong emotions which, for lack of words, I cannot express; but also the language of comfort and simple things.
When I mean Hungarian I clergy, I seem to regress to an infantile state. I recognize its round and sweet cadence, I am cradled by those words that horrified my teacher at the Hungarian Academy in Rome, who judged dialectal lemmas as bunchcup, or chickpeas, potatoes, too coarse for the ear of a Budapest citizen. Words such as cup and potatoes perfectly express my linguistic age in Hungarian, stopping at the expression of my primary needs, and corresponding to my six years, the age at which I stopped practicing it in my daily life.
Much better the level of my other mother tongue, Romanian, which I was able to keep in practice thanks to the presence of the large Romanian diaspora that has found a home in Italy since the 2000s. My Romanian is a contamination of dialects combined with a inflection that when I return to Romania no one is able to attribute, yet labeled as certainly a foreigner.
I can only love the cadence of Transylvanian Romanian, an inflection that always makes me feel at home. Servus, Transylvanian greeting of Latin derivation and all those interlayers, jaj, borrowed from Hungarian, and which take on a different meaning from time to time. I have a soft spot for the declinations and dialect of Oltenia, the historic region of southern Romania, my father’s land. It is there that the use of the remote past in the spoken language resists (the simple perfect), fallen into disuse in the rest of the country. Indeed it is said fusei, I saw, She, to indicate I was, I saw, I did. I really like the sound of headwords such plainlytomatoes, which in standard Romanian have the evocative name of tomatoes; e watermelonthe watermelon, known in other regions rather as watermelon. Of standard Romanian, I love what at times may seem like a ceremonious formality, which requires addressing anyone who is not familiar with the Yourbutter.
I like the uniqueness of Romanian in a Latin language freed from the romantic constraints of poetic cadence, typical of other Romance languages, to adopt, as befits peoples with troubled histories, a certain harshness of sound, represented by the hoarse voice, intoned and forte of Maria Tănase, who in the 1940s sang the verses of a traditional ballad of romania that his voice made iconic. World Worldworld, but also people.
Italian is an acquired language, yet it is maternal to me. In Italian I became aware of myself. To Dorotea, my high school Italian literature teacher, I owe my adult vocabulary and my understanding of the world through the prism of our literature. It is Dorotea who made me discover a language that crosses the boundaries of everyday life, imaginative, archaic, dignified, to go around and become everyday again.
All my tongues, more or less maternal, are mutilated, severed. Mutilations dictated by interruptions, shifts between geographical and linguistic spaces. Yet, what one lacks, I find in another, imperfections that complement each other. Rosa Piro, linguist, states that from the awareness of the limits of the translation of culture-specific concepts, and from the contamination of the different linguistic realities, arise “language festivals ” that distinguish migrant writings. A pastiche of idioms and imaginations that we find in the literature of writers such as Elvira Mujcic ed Igiaba Scego . That their writing represents the nuances of an enriched language which is the Italian of the present and the future, ed the overcoming of linguistic monolithism, the linguistic humanity of the Roman public transport line 14 proves it. A tour on this populous tram is enough, the route of which starts from Viale Palmiro Togliatti and arrives at Termini station to hear a thousand and more voices speaking a lively Italian, an expression of numerous diasporas residing in the capital and the many young Italians who in the same conversation freely cross linguistic and cultural boundaries passing from Chinese, or from Urdu, or from Romanian, to Italian, with the necessary introductions of the Roman dialect. On the 14th, in this plurilingualism made up of many mother tongues, I feel at home.
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