The Forked Tongue

“How do you know when someone is lying?” asked Gary Douglas, the creator and founder of Access Consciousness, during a podcast interview that I recall listening to several seasons ago. After a few incorrect guesses, he lightheartedly quipped, “Their mouth is moving.”

The truth is that the nature of human language is complex. It is not that we as human beings intrinsically set out to lie; it's that language with all its nuances and complex abstract meanings is limited in its capacity to be fully individualistic and a true representation of the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of the person who is speaking it. Just as monkeys have learned to mime some of our behaviors, we have acquired language through the art of mimicry, and in some regards its perpetuation is the most elaborate game of “telephone” ever played. What is hidden inside of a language are the histories of civilizations, countless family sagas, and the blending of a multitude of cultures, and despite the incessant chattering of a unique inner voice that spawned from this sprinkling of seeds, a voice we think of as “us”, what we are at the very heart of our essence is more than a mere product of these elements. Language is a great tool, but it should never define us or limit our capacity to create and express our realities. However, if we must create a story for ourselves, then we must first realize that the narrative we compose is purely our choice. The symbols and the characters that we use might have already been created, but we get to choose how and when to use them, reflect on them, and carry them into the future.

In this narrative, I will acquaint you with several generations of my family and illustrate for you how I bought a lie that was not my own and how that lie shaped my attitude towards the English language for many years. I will also share for you some of the things that began to change that as I expanded my innerworld to include more people in it.

Born in a small town in Pennsylvania to the son of Eastern European immigrants and a mother with strong Pennsylvania Dutch roots, I was exposed to a unique dialect of English that I rejected wholeheartedly. My dad was responsible for most of this, and I can understand why. When each of his parents had arrived through Ellis Island, neither one of them knew a word of English. My grandpa had come here as a boy with his parents in hopes of a better life, and my grandma traveled here alone by boat when she was only 17 in a quest to flee Europe during World War I and reunite with her father who had left her alone on their farm while her brothers were fighting in the great war. They spoke slavic tongues, the two of them, Polish and Slovakian, which were close enough in linguistic origin and structure that they were able to communicate without first having to learn the other’s mother tongue. However, immigrants were viewed as highly suspect back then. If you can imagine how it is for immigrants today, it was even worse back then. While immigration laws may have been more open, American nationalism and the wars that wreaked havoc on European soil made the average American skeptical of anyone who was not born here or who spoke a different language, and there were less protections against discrimination for jobs and housing. My grandparents learned English and naturalized as American citizens, but they could not rid themselves of their accents. What they could do was prevent their children from learning their languages and having an accent.

Therefore, my dad, the son of a coal miner who passed away from black lung in the mines when my dad was only 9 years old, developed a strict stance when it came to my older brother and I speaking proper English at home. He’d adopted this attitude from his parents who never taught him to speak their languages. The sixth of seven children, he grew up learning how to speak the common tongue from his older siblings, from neighborhood kids, and from his teacher at a one-room schoolhouse. He also developed his tongue beyond the classroom through his continued education and career as a mechanical engineer. It’s only natural to want a better life for your children, and he didn’t want us to struggle like he did. So even when we were infants, “baby talk” was not allowed. If he caught anyone doing that around his child, he would give them a tongue lashing, and that included his mother-in-law.

York County, Pennsylvania, has a long history that goes back to the American colonies. And that’s where I grew up. My mom was born in a small rural part of the county called Hellam, and her mother was Pennsylvania Dutch. Although the term Pennsylvania Dutch is generally equated with the Amish by anyone outside of the state of Pennsylvania, those who grew up there know that the Amish are only a subset of the group. Most people who call themselves the Pennsylvania Dutch are English-speaking descendants of German immigrants. My mom had quite a bit of Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry from her maternal grandmother and grew up in an area where German still influenced the common tongue with a few borrowed words, different grammar practices, and non-standard ways of pronouncing certain words. Therefore, my mom, grandma, and a few others from her side of the family spoke in a way that my dad deemed uneducated because it was not the proper English he had worked so hard to learn to speak.

When my dad married my mom, he did his best to get her to stop from speaking this way, but it would come out in certain words now and then. “Werter” for water. “Onest” instead of once. Some people called this way of speaking English “Dutchified”. This is because it’s not true Pennsylvania Dutch, but a form of English derived from the original Pennsylvania Dutch language, which was actually a dialect of German despite the misnomer. The Germans call the language Deutsch, and that became “Dutch” in this form of pidgin English. My father’s point-of-view became my point-of-view too. He passed that down to me. I’m not sure if he realized that it made me look down on certain people for a time. I even wrote a rather caustic essay about people who spoke like this in the 7th grade when prompted to talk about one of my pet peeves for an English class. To me, these people sounded stupid like they must not even go to school. There was also an attitude that anyone who spoke that way was probably from the other side of the tracks, and there was general distrust and lack of openness towards them. I didn’t equate them as my kinsmen. And I didn’t think about our history or our shared roots.

On a work assignment, my dad took our family to Italy for three months when I was a toddler. I do not personally remember this, but I was learning to speak Italian by the time we left, and through my parents’ memories of those times and stories of my recent Eastern European ancestry, I felt a strong connection to the “Old Country” of Europe and wished for some kind of cultural experience that I could claim as my heritage. My surname is Polish, and my dad and one of my aunts were able to teach me a few words in that language. However, that was it. A few ethnic Christmas and Easter traditions were observed, but as an adult, I am no longer religious and don’t celebrate the holidays the same way anymore. For years, I felt a void, and wondered, what culture can I call my own?

Reflecting back on this, in a way, I think I was somewhat robbed. My dad’s parents chose not to pass down their culture and language to their children, and my dad in-turn made sure that whatever was left of my mom’s heritage was not passed down further either. After my mom passed away in 2007, I moved on my own to New Mexico where I have grown to increasingly respect Mexican American culture. It’s not my culture, but through friendships that have formed a basis of family in my life after my parent’s passing, I have experienced many elements of Mexican and Spanish-speaking culture firsthand. I am truly grateful for that and embrace it as something familiar to me now rather than foreign. Many Mexican Americans have chosen to be brave enough to keep their culture and language beyond the first generation of immigrants, and I love that about the culture. It takes courage to keep a sense of your family’s past in a world that increasingly asks us to homogenize. It’s not that becoming more alike is bad either; it’s that we often forget we even have a choice.

Upon further reflection, I also want to speak about the evolution of my own attitudes. My distaste for “Dutchified” English wasn’t truly mine. It was an attitude that was passed down for multiple generations. To be successful here in the United States meant that your tongue needed to be anglicized. However, would I look down on anyone for speaking broken English if they came from any other place in the world? Of course not. It means that they speak another language or another English dialect that is unique to their heritage, and they have every right to embrace who they are and where they are from. Every language evolves over time. English today is not the same as it was 500 years ago. This is because cultural exchange is frequent among people, and everything that is a product of that exchange including children and new dialects should never be a source of shame. Instead, it should be embraced. So I apologize to my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors and to those who speak or have spoken “Dutchified” English to whom I turned my nose down in the past. I would not be who I am today without you. However, I also acknowledge that who I am is not defined by the past either. I am here because of the past, I am aware of the present of my language narrative, and the future is yet to be created.

The forked tongue reminds us of the fabled serpent who whispered the words of deceit that tricked the first woman into eating the forbidden fruit, an act that got her and husband banished from paradise. However, what if we thought of that fork instead like a fork in the road, a choice of whether to go right or whether to go left, and neither choice were wrong? What if having a forked tongue meant we could choose our language consciously and write our own path, maybe even rewriting our own narrative once or twice to include a little more of the world each time?