I’ve been hanging around on this website a lot lately, trying to relearn my elementary BSL in front of a mirror:
http://www.bslhomework.org.uk/index.php
Two years of Mandarin Chinese lessons in my teens have left me with about four words of the language and a leftover affection for the difficulty of getting tones right. I did a degree in Italian and I was fluentish for a while; it’s subsiding. French is drifting too. My grasp of German is very slight: I can talk with excessive emphasis, helpless grammar and wildly invented vocabulary and I love it like this. My partner is half German and I anticipate eventually learning the language to a good degree of fluency, and I regret that this loose use of the language will have to go.
It strikes me that the languages I’ve taught myself and picked up in various incompetent and ad hoc ways are the ones I most enjoy speaking, even if I do it pretty badly.
I suppose this is evidence of my analytical rather than social interest in language, because being delighted by the badness of a badly learned language doesn’t do much good when I’m trying to get something said. I was at a wedding in Germany a few weeks ago and felt helplessly grateful to a kind woman who patiently let me try and say interesting things to her about the history of choreography. I dread to think what it actually sounded like. She may have been nodding and smiling with complete bemusement.
This delight in half-learned languages has informed my artwork for many years, and I’ve often worked with translation and multilingualism specifically because of what is to be found in the gap between separate languages – when you step outside of one and don’t manage to step all the way into another.
But although I’m bringing to this project the excitement of my unfamiliarity with BSL, in this case my main concern isn’t my own relationship with the language but rather the particularities of BSL itself. It isn’t so much the potential of the gaps in between individual languages that interests me here as the singular gap in between Language and World.
